


Voltron: Wayfarer

by ClockworkRainbow



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fan Continuity, Comprehensive reimagining, Gen, May contain traces of: Vforce; GoLion; DotU et. al
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-14
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2019-11-18 00:59:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 27,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18110096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClockworkRainbow/pseuds/ClockworkRainbow
Summary: A chance discovery at the edge of the universe and an ancient enemy unearthed from beneath a major planet, galaxies apart, conspire to set the fate of the universe in the hands of six moderately unprepared people and five lost superweapons. It'll, you know, probably be fine.Or: A story you know some of, in a completely different way.





	1. Blue

            “So I’m out of ammo, we’re both out of extra clothes, the horza are closing in and this is about the point where I’m like ‘Guin, if you make it out of this before me, you’re not allowed to say anything dumb at my funeral’, and _then_ ,” a hand pounded the kevlar table for emphasis, its owner leaning forwards, eyes glinting triumphantly.

            “McClain, I’m pretty sure you already regaled Santora with a _different_ story of how you lost your finger, and she didn’t believe _that_ one, either.”

            Lance sat up in affront. “What? No, there’s no way, this is a totally authentic-”

            The Surrhian sitting across the table from him waved her lower left arm ambiguously. “Eh. You were losing me about the part with the man-eating horza herd.” Making use of the arm just lofted, she slouched to one side and rested her head on its palm. “Story about blood debt to pirates was better.”

            Defeated, he wilted to rest his chin on the table next to the vacated container of his lunch. “You could’ve said something.”

            Almedi Santora cracked a tusked smile. “Could have. Didn’t. It was funnier.”

            “Betrayal.” He tipped his head over, cheek pressed against the table. “Abject betrayal. Namora, do you see how much I’m being betrayed right now?” He sat up, twisting to look at her, and then narrowed his eyes, seeing her typing on a tablet without looking at him.

            Namora was a sturdy terran woman, easily two decades older than Lance, with deep black skin to his warmer brown. Today, this was accessorized with a rusty orange hijab tucked into the collar of her coat. “Mhm,” she offered dryly.

            “Well of course you do, since you did it first.” He considered another self-pitying slouch on the table, but remembered his empty ration can and swiped it up. “I’m going back to work, y’know, with my real friends.”

            “Oh, before you do that,” Namora’s eyes lifted from the screen. “Swing by the engine room?”

            A pause. “…Oh boy. What happened now?”

            She turned the tablet so he could see its interface. “Three hundred messages from primary engine.”

            Lance sucked a breath through his teeth, dropping the can in the receptacle. “I’m on it.”

            By now, he could find his way through these routes like sleepwalking, fingertips ghosted to the wall even though he wasn’t in particular danger of falling. The _FSS Emissary_ was a relic practically as old as the settlement of the outer galaxies; like most vessels of her time, she boasted broad, hexagonal passageways that sloped and wound their way all throughout her body. These, her veins- some closed to age, warped or worn or simply leading to abandoned rooms and unused passages.

            Some might find it unpredictable, messy, disorganized- and yet the _Emissary_ ’s paths had a rhythm to them, if you could find it. A turn here, a rattling elevator there, plunging deep into the warm heart within the fortified belly of the ship. It was a peaceable thing, gave someone time to think, appreciate the silence.

            Engine one, incidentally, was not silent.

            “-to hear some _colony brat_ tell me I don’t know how to maintain a damn coolant tank!”

            Not just because of the steady low roar of the engines, but because as loud as it might be down here, the people who worked down here found a way to be louder.

            “I don’t _need_ to tell you! Frankly, the problem here is that I _had_ to tell you!” A white-gloved finger jabbed into a broad palm. “The sound those pipes are making should be telling you _for_ me! What’s the usual sign you wait for around here, the backflow getting so bad it chokes the engine?”

            Gheda rasped her pedipalps in exasperation. “So it doesn’t sing like a damn halcher’s finch! Sorry we can’t live up to your blasted perfect standards, because out here, we actually have _work_ to do, rather than scrubbing the coolant fittings with a fickin’ toothbrush!”

            “Okay, that’s not what I was saying, what I was saying was-”

            Oh boy. Lance knew it was coming before it hit, but still winced at Gheda’s scathing “ _fine_ ,” the muffled thump of her cleaning cloth tossed against someone’s chest. A moment later, the sound of boots on the rungs of the ladder brought her within Lance’s view- puffing slightly, either from the exertion, from anger, or a combination of the two.

            He got out of her way, waving quietly. For her part, she glanced at him, grunted, and then swept out, muttering something about replacement piping, with several more upsetting words tossed in the mix.

            When the room was quiet, he stuck his head out over the ladder, and down into the room.

            Hunk was picking at the cloth that had been tossed at him with an unimpressed set to his features. It was the particular expression he tended to wear when he was choosing something to be mad at that wasn’t his coworker.

            Gold eyes raised to take in Lance’s position, then dropped back to the cloth. “This thing’s way too abrasive. She needs a new one.”

            Conversation initiated, Lance moved down the ladder to join him. “Yeah, it’s… not the only thing around here.”

            The furrowed brow quirked a bit. “It was an honest suggestion, Lance.”

            “Yeah, yeah-” he raised his hands, rested one on Hunk’s shoulder. “I know, really. That was… it wasn’t specific to you.”

            Hunk tossed the rag lengthwise into a waiting bin, giving a dark look at a particular cluster of pipes. He took in a breath, sighed. “I mean, your coolant is- it’s no main fuel line, but it’s still the heart of the whole process here. I know half the guys in my class at Satelia would run away screaming from pipes that sound like that.”

            Lance found a structure that had no obvious ports and was low enough to the ground to sit on, and settled into place. There were a few things he appreciated about Hunk. One of them was, given time and space, most of his frustrations tended to unwind out of his mouth.

            “And if it’s not the pipes, it’s something else. I’m trying to be nice here, _really_. It’s a piece of history, and, if I’m being really honest here? It’s a _nice_ ship. Sure, it’s no Federation Starcutter, but I knew that signing on, and these old rigs were the state of their art at the time.” On flustered reflex, Hunk set over his toolkit, fingertips counting out a familiar rhythm on the shining pieces of metal within, tapping this one up slightly, its neighbor down, others simply touching to ascertain they were there, oriented properly.

            “Got that right.” There was no small amount of pride in Lance’s input, tempered as it was by the real subject in mind. “The _Emissary_ is practically our grandma.”

            A conciliatory gesture, brandished with the authority of a royal sanction. “Yeah, it’s your grandma, and you don’t want to say anything bad about your grandma while you’re having tea in her parlor, I get that, but this isn’t about you don’t like granny’s taste in drapes, this is, whether or not granny’s going to have a congestive heart failure and condemn you all into a slow death between galaxies, here, and that’s- someone’s _gotta_ say it.” The kit was in order, and, so, Hunk folded it, briskly, stuck it under his arm. “Especially if you’re basically her doctor.”

            It was a familiar topic, they’d chased it before. Lance sighed, leaning back. “I hear you. But I’m not Gheda, and Gheda’s…”

            “-Been doing this job for forty years. She reminds me.” Hunk went to scrub his face with a hand, studied the palm of his glove, and then obviously thought better of it, fishing in his pocket for a cloth to do the job instead. “I don’t know what she wants me to do, here, unless I invent time travel and drop myself here _fifty_ years ago, I’ll still be _right_ , and in the meantime there’s so much more we could be doing, if she’d just-” an exhale. “ _Work_ with me.”

            Gheda. How could he explain Gheda, briefly, to someone who’d never had the woman barge belatedly into your room with an obscure vintage from her private collection because you weren’t _allowed_ to think she’d forgotten your birthday, or seen her meeting her entire pod of grandkids at the port, or the thousand other shards of softness that held together a thunderstorm of a lumani?

            Then again, he hadn’t more than half a span of experience with Hunk, and he had the same problem explaining Hunk to Gheda. It’d be easier if people knew how to listen. It’d be easier if he had any idea how to explain that.

            “I hear you,” he said, again, instead.

            And, in the ensuing space, as close to silence as the engines of the _Emissary_ ever got, they both heard- perhaps _felt_ more than heard- the shudder that climbed her spine.

* * *

 

            _noiselightsound;presence;pressure;_

_Process;failuretoprocess;_

_Hurts?;_

_Why;_

_You?;_

_Waiting…;_

_Long?;_

_Too long?;_

_Process;failuretoprocess;_

_Hurting?;Me?;_

* * *

 

            “What was that?”

            Hunk was predictably halfway across the room, fingers flying at consoles. “Main arm’s out. Something must’ve gone wrong with the dig. Looks like it’s damaged.” A window popped up, buzzed at him- he jabbed it impatiently with a thumb, but it didn’t yield. “Come on…”

            Lance hovered. This wasn’t exactly his area, but, there was only so long he could tolerate focused silence. “What’s it saying?”

            “Security clearance. I guess some things on this ship actually _are_ up to code, like, you can’t pull schematics on the drill from the engine room.”

            A heavy, metallic _whump_ drew Lance’s attention to the ladder. Gheda vaulted it, hitting the walkway. “Of course it’s not going to let you. Which is why you need to get to the bridge.”

            Hunk raised his eyebrows, evidently as thrown by that statement as Lance was. “I’m _engine_ detail-”

            “-And you’ve got the steadiest hands of anybody on this ship and you work under pressure. This isn’t a love fest, Garrett, this is a maintenance situation. Engine’s not about to fry itself and I can change a damn coolant pipe or twenty. We don’t have a guarantee like that on the drill.” She jerked a scarred thumb over her shoulder, all four eyes narrowed. “So get a move on.”

            Hunk had dropped his tools when he’d run to the console; he picked them up, tapped what he could back into place in its bundled state, and then hit the ladder at a run. Lance was barely half a step behind him- when the engineer paused in the hallway, Lance could overtake him. “Come on. I know a shortcut.”

            He set off down the hall quickly, not needing to look back or wait for the sound of boots in his wake. Hunk’s voice floated after him: “This really better not be like that shortcut you told me about last time,”

            “This is _nothing_ like last time.” Third right, a left, the maintenance elevator with the control panel nobody’d fixed in ages that could be easily lifted, one wire pulled and adjusted, and suddenly it wasn’t asking for verification any more when you put it back together. It slid down, the door parted with a pleasant hiss, and Lance gestured grandly at it. “Because _this_ one is air-conditioned, filtered, and I’m pretty sure if I killed an afternoon I could get it to play music.”

            Hunk watched him, electronic eyes bright with some unvoiced thought. A moment later he shook his head, an appreciative smile creeping up his features as he stepped into the lift. “That is so illegal.”

            “Pssh, we’re in international space, it’s not _that_ illegal.”

            The bridge was quiet when they entered. The captain was leaning forwards on the armrests of his chair, staring at the screen with an unreadable expression, though, as others turned to look at the door, he turned as well.

            Hunk straightened in place, smartening himself on reflex. “Uh, Captain Edison, sir.”

            A thin smile stretched under the captain’s mustache. “Why,” he said softly, “when I tell Gheda to send the best person she can spare, am I not surprised to see you two?”

            Lance grinned. “He’s a genius and I’m continuously underfoot?”

            That actually got a bit of a laugh through the room. That was good. It meant things weren’t _that_ much of a disaster. The captain smoothed his mustache with one hand, looking back to the screen. “How much do you know about what’s going on?”

            Lance tucked his hands in his pockets. “Well, I’m not the engineer in the room, but, the main drill’s fucked.”

            Hunk raised his hand. “I _am_ the engineer in the room, and we don’t have sufficient data to conclude ‘fucked’ but I’d say pretty bad.”

            The captain and his first mate exchanged a look, and the latter shrugged. “Well, you’re not wrong.” She leaned over the console, tapping a few things carefully with clawed fingers. An image popped up from the surface- a huge, oblong shape which stretched over five times the _Emissary_ ’s length, with the former hanging off of one end looking like little more than a glorified mosquito. A long, thin bridge- the ship’s primary drilling arm- joined them, a bridge that in the diagram flashed at multiple points with red structural alerts, “BKG-1984. The probes said this thing was some kind of heavy metal core, so it’s not like we weren’t expecting trouble. That’s our sharpest bit array out there.”

            Hunk walked up to get a closer look at the picture. “What are we talking? The bit array, I mean.”

            “Heptonite. Quarter-by-quarter structure, imported from Olkarion, and twenty years newer than our air refinery. Which, considering what we _paid_ for it,” the first mate flexed a particular grim smile that was more than a bit stressful to see on a galra, given how many of her teeth it showed off, “I’m going to be _very_ unhappy if it quit on us because of a bit of grit in the wrong place.”

            Hunk raised a hand, cautiously- the first mate stepped back, letting him access the display. As soon as his hand touched the surface, the hesitation was summarily jettisoned- he had four more screens open, and was flipping through schematics on one of them. “…You’re not kidding, that’s a Tespa bit. They use those back at Satelia as a role model for the whole industry. High performance, top-class durability. That’s better than I was expecting you guys to have shelled out for.” A pause, emerging from the problem long enough to consider his own words. “No offense.”

            “None taken.” Captain Edison let his good leg touch the floor, rocking his chair slightly in thought. “What is your hypothesis?”

            “See if this wasn’t a heptonite bit, the stress alerts from the arm and that the computer estimate is that it can’t be retracted like this-”

            “It can’t.” That was Guin, near the point of the bridge, looking up from his station. He flashed a rueful grin. “That was the first thing we tried. It was either gonna pull us out of safe orbit or snap the arm off if we didn’t hit the brakes on it, so we stopped trying.”

            There was a glint in Hunk’s eye as he considered that. Or, at least, what Lance would describe as a glint- there weren’t really any _absence_ of light from his eyes sufficient to identify the difference. “Then that just makes me stick by it more.”

            “What?”

            He looked up towards Guin, frowning. “You hit something tougher than heptonite. The bit’s caught.”

            _This_ caught a wave of interest, a few people looking around. Captain Edison raised a hand, and the room went quiet. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. If what Mr. Garrett says is true, then a few interesting things may be in our future. However, that is only an _if_ right now. We need to focus on what _is_ , which is that the arm appears snagged on something, and if we are to make any progress, I think someone will need to take Mr. Garrett’s eyes down to the site, and see what, exactly, has caught the drill.”

            “Oh, joy,” Lance draped his entire body forwards on the air, rounding his shoulders. “ _Spacewalking_. I hate spacewalking.”

            Guin patted him consolingly on the back. “Hey, just think of it this way. You always wanted to be part of history, right?”

* * *

 

            The slush room was lit by flickering yellow bulbs in metal cages, and, as that appetizing choice in décor implied, it was a place where the mind wandered, while the body roved mechanically through the process of donning an exosuit, making sure the boots and gloves sealed, settling the harness over the body.

            “Y’know you don’t actually have to do this?”

            Lance looked over at Hunk. He was already fully suited, having headed straight for the lock while Lance had commiserated with Guin. As a result, Lance had operated under the impression Hunk hadn’t caught his gripe- maybe he hadn’t, and just remembered Lance’s not particularly private dislike for what they were about to undertake. “What do you mean?”

            “There were like eight other guys in there doing nothing but stand around brushing their noses. Pretty sure three of ‘em were playing zigmarol at their stations. I could get one of them to walk me down.”

            “I don’t like _space_.” Lance fitted his helmet on, waiting for it to pressurize and coms to initiate before he continued. “That doesn’t mean I don’t like _you_. Besides, this is like the first exciting thing that’s happened this haul since Santora won Laskar’s pants in a game of three-shift poker.”

            “ _Still proud of that_ ,” the voice crackled over the coms.

            “ _Miss Santora, I do not believe that classifies as vital communication._ ” Captain Edison did his finest impression of someone who was not amused.

            Evidently, it was effective, as they were left to silence as they proceeded to the lock itself. This was one of the oldest parts of the ship, unchanged by the years because it had been crafted for permanence: two twelve-by-twenty-foot hatches, secured on all sides with rivets the size of Lance’s head, each holding down massive plates of galran steel. The first door raised an entire vocabulary of creaks and groans as it parted to admit them, as if the _Emissary_ , aging matron that she was, protested this particular side of her seeing actual work.

            He ran a hand along the side of the lock, the pressure of the rough metal through his gloves steadying his nerves a little. It took his mind off the door behind him closing, and the comparatively quieter, younger hum of the engines firing to strip the atmosphere out of the room. A fading buzz at his hip told him the tether was coming online, anchoring him to Hunk, and the both of them to the closest patch of the _Emissary_ ’s skeleton.

            When the second hatch opened, it did so just as arduously as the first, but Lance couldn’t hear it. He exhaled, focusing on that sound, reminding himself to stop straining his ears for something that wouldn’t carry for him.

            They stepped ahead, stood at the edge of the _Emissary_. Before them stretched the horizon, in all directions, star-studded, not black, truly, but a shimmer of every color.

            Hunk tipped off that edge, and Lance caught his breath again, feeling the subtle tug of the tether. He followed, angled his body and fired the thruster on his back against the unmoored emptiness outside of the _Emissary_ ’s gravity.

            “ _See_?” Hunk’s voice was encouraging. Cross-tether coms weren’t held to the same rules as ship-to-suit. “ _Not so bad._ ”

            “ _This_ part isn’t bad.” They found the arm- and compared to how small it looked on the bridge imaging, it was _enormous_. A pillar of metal and ductwork that stretched miles in both directions, up to the giant tower-shaped shadow of the _Emissary_ , and down to the surface of BKG-1984, which was just beginning to experience its own sort of sunrise- the giant rolling soundlessly out of the way of the white star it orbited.

            Lance put his hand on the drill arm, and then pulled forwards with it, putting on another boost from his thruster. Hunk didn’t seem to want to use the physical structure of the _Emissary_ to help his gliding- he just jetted forwards, down towards the surface. “The part that _bugs_ me is the part where, if we mess up and something happens to the tether, I’m gonna float in the middle of nowhere until I _starve_.”

            Hunk chuckled- the coms didn’t pick it up, but, his shoulders shook visibly all the same. “ _You have any idea the statistical odds of both of those happening at the same time? Seriously, the people who die spacewalking from drifting away from their ship is statistically microscopic._ ”

            “Great, so, now you’re jinxing it, and we’re _definitely_ gonna die.”

            “ _If we are, it’s because we get hit by a rock, not because the tether snaps and throws us into the void._ ” Hunk maneuvered around a jagged chunk of floating stone- no doubt broken off from the initial bore, caught his footing on it and boosted.

            Lance hung back until the tether beeped at him urgently- then he had to scramble to catch up. “Y’know for a guy who’s spent maybe a cycle in space tops, you’re good at this.”

            “ _Yeah, after I quit the boxing team my gym elective was zero-g maneuvering. Four semesters of that, ‘course it was all basically in a glorified fish tank. Doesn’t hold up to the real deal._ ” He flipped over to look back, grinning- his face fell a bit seeing the expression Lance was making. “ _…C’mon, we’re almost there. I dunno how I feel about being the adventurous one here._ ”

            Lance at least made a summary attempt at a smile. He tipped backwards, shifting the controls in his gloves to turn the thruster so it pushed him down to BKG’s surface. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

            “ _Nothing_ ,” Hunk warbled, in the timeless, unconvincing singsong of someone with very little remorse. He crouched, peering down a steep incline. “ _Huh. Whatever the drill hit, it’s pretty far down there. Looks like it was halfway to the core, at least._ ”

            “Well, what are we waiting for?” BKG was large enough to have some gravity to its name- not the carefully adjusted levels of the _Emissary_ , but enough that the unsteadiness of the void was gone- he jumped, enjoying the sense of lightness now before momentum carried him down the breach.

            He heard Hunk laugh, loud enough this time the coms caught it, and felt a tug on the tether that eased. “ _Yeah, normal Lance is back. Missed you for a sec, there, dude_.”

            “We’ve all got stuff we don’t like.” Here was an issue- a spur of stone that stuck close to the arm, but not close enough to be the source of the jam- it just had to be negotiated. “You hate prepackaged food, when people touch your tools, Gheda’s attitude…”

            “ _I don’t_ hate _ration cans. They’re just… do you know why they’re called ration cans? Because they’re supposed to be_ rations _. Y’know, when you’re out of real food. Not because we’re on a ship with forty thousand rooms and nobody installed a kitchen._ ”

            He motioned grandly at Hunk’s indignation. “And I hate spacewalking.” He was nearly around the spur, now- one foot hit open air, and if it weren’t space he could imagine the welcome breeze rising up from further in the cave, warm and humid.

            Hunk had caught up with him while he was making his way around the spar. “ _I can’t believe you grew up on a spaceport and you’re scared of space._ ”

            “Okay, I dunno what they tell you at colony school, but spaceports-” he jumped, and it came up short- another outcropping just under it. The tunnel was getting rougher. “have atmosphere and gravity generators. And, no, the mayor doesn’t threaten to turn them off if you eat too many cookies, that’s just what your big brother tells you when you’re five and he feels like being a jerk.” He made another jump, a shallower one, and hit something that was not stone, that echoed up his body as he struck it.

* * *

 

            _Presence;_

_Process;awake;dream;understanding_

_Long;_

_It’s been so long;_

_I am;_

_Happy?;_

* * *

 

            “Hunk, get a look at this.” He crouched, brushed dust from the surface. Flakes of rust scraped away with it, floated up past his helmet. The metal underneath was scraped, dirty, but clearly had once been a polished surface. He scrubbed harder, shed more rust- it was blue. Deep blue, a color that had to have been expensive, in such enduring enamel. There was even the faintest hint of luster to it, throwing back the light from his helmet spots.

            Hunk’s face was almost invisible this far down- the spots of his eyes shone regardless. He fiddled with the com settings on his helmet a moment. “ _Captain? It looks like we hit a ship_.”

            The metal extended in broad planes, nested inside of each other. Around the drill, part of it had been buffed bright, the surface yielding only _slightly_ to reveal something pale-colored and sparkling underneath it. The first bank of drills in the bit were set at an angle, like bad teeth- it was the second bank that had sunk into it, after the first had glanced off.

            He didn’t realize he’d walked towards the site until the tether stopped him- it had been beeping in his ears for a while now. Huh. He glanced back at Hunk, who was regarding him with a wordless question he didn’t know how to answer. He shifted his mouth, tried to sort the words in the order that felt right. “Come on. There’s got to be a way in here somewhere.”

            Hunk closed the distance. “ _Whatever this is, I think it’s kicking out some kind of radiation. I’m not getting an answer. You having any more luck than I am?_ ”

            “I didn’t hear anything.” Hopping down a shallow rise- there was a broad plateau of the ship’s back, between where they’d landed and where the drill had struck it. He had a good feeling past the drill. “Well, if that’s the case, we better figure out what we’re dealing with before we phone it in, huh?”

            “ _Can you please try and average a normal amount of concerned?_ ”

            “Come on, Hunk. It’s a fossilized derelict. What’s it gonna do, eat us?”

            “ _Okay, hypothetical number one, we get in there and hit a couple of levers for the hell of it, it has enough juice in its engines to adjust BKG’s position enough to break the arm and close the tunnel, burying us under eight hundred feet of rubble where we die of head injuries. Lance, don’t ask me for nightmare scenarios, I have an anxiety disorder._ ”

            Here- beyond the second bank of drills, another flat area, sloping downwards into the rock. It sat in enough of a gap that one side was exposed, and Lance could easily slide down to stand next to it. Even covered in dust and grime, it was impossible to hide the way the metal was folded over itself like ripples.

            He pressed his hand to the side. It wasn’t just his imagination; it was warm. “Man, what are the odds this thing _does_ still work? It’s got to have been down here for ages.”

            Hunk was standing a lot closer to him than before. Whether that was out of a yearning for solidarity, fear of the unknown, or preparation to haul Lance over his shoulder if he reached to touch anything Hunk didn’t approve of, Lance wasn’t sure. “ _Hypothetical number one, Lance, hypothetical number one! We were just over this!_ ”

            His fingertip caught on something- and then an opening simply flowed into the metal as seamlessly as if it had always been there.

            Hunk squinted into the darkened chamber. “ _Okay, hypothetical number two, this is a trap and we’re about to get murdered by pira-_ Lance where are you going _,_ ”

            He paused, one foot on the threshold, and looked back to Hunk. He gestured at the door. “Hunk, when life hands you a mystery door, are you really gonna be the guy who never knows what was on the other side of it?”

            Hunk’s voice crackled over the coms behind him. “ _Counterpoint: Are you really gonna be the guy who gets killed because he can’t say no to a door that technically isn’t even asking him anything?_ ”

            The interior didn’t seem to be rusty and damaged like the exterior. As best as he could tell with just the headlights, it had a blue and gray color scheme, elegant panels and tiles fit together in formations that covered wall, floor, and ceiling alike.

            Hunk apparently made up his mind, and the tether slacked as he approached. Lance looked back to him, pretending not to notice his expression. “Oh, nice of you to join us.”

            “ _If you get us killed I’m never forgiving you_. _Just, putting that down, for the record, on actual nice stationary, any of your future life-endangering actions can and will be held against you._ ”

            He didn’t plan on putting Hunk’s life in danger, so, that was just dandy.

            “Y’know, given the size of the ship, I kinda expected these passages to be bigger.” They came to a cross-section; this at least opened to a shorter, broader channel, one that he and Hunk could at least walk abreast in. This led, not to a bridge, but a shallow, rounded room dominated by wide banks of panels, a huge, dark screen, and a single chair.

            “ _…Huh._ ” Hunk’s curiosity had briefly defeated his fear. “ _Setup looks like a fighter ship._ ” He paused, humming thoughtfully. “ _…Lance, how old do you think BKG is?_ ”

            “I’m not a geologist,” Lance shrugged, venturing to look over the panels. “Why?”

            “ _Asteroids this size don’t happen overnight. Especially out somewhere like this. That star’s been cooked for centuries, and that’s basically the highest energy source we have around here. So this ship has to have been stuck here long enough for BKG to grow around it. And this_ definitely _doesn’t look like anything I recognize. So… this thing might be lost era._ ”

            “So we might’ve made a major archeological find and got our most expensive drill bit stuck in it?” Lance tried the chair. “Huh. Well, if it’s thousands of years old, at least it’s comfy.”

            There was a flicker of light, and then… he _heard_ it. Outside the coms, a steady hiss.

            “ _Oh boy. Oh no here we go, Lance, you did it, now we’re dealing with-_ ” Hunk brought up something in his helmet, frowned. “ _…breathable atmosphere?_ ”

            “Oh no,” Lance offered cheerfully.

            “ _Okay that’s- just because it’s not killing us right this second doesn’t make that not weird. This is decent air quality, but air refiners have a life of thirty years_ tops _. So either someone dug this thing up to change the refiner and then buried it back up again, or…_ ” His hand thunked a few times thoughtfully against the jaw piece of his helmet. “ _I don’t even know what the ‘or’ would be here._ ”

            Lance tapped a console, and screens jumped to view. “Well, let’s find out.”

            Text flowered across them, text and images. They blinked uncertainly, in what Lance presumed was alarms- but the spidery, spiraling script that helpfully denoted everything was nothing he’d ever seen before.

            Hunk leaned forwards to squint. “ _I think that’s…_ ” He frowned, tapping his hand against his chin. “ _I mean it might be_ -”

            A voice- a smooth alto, making a clear statement in bell-like words.

            They both jumped. The voice paused, said something else, more in an inquiring tone.

            “ _Is that… a recording?_ ”

            “Maybe. There might be language settings in here somewhere…”

            It spoke again; this time something sharper, hard consonants but the same light, inquisitive undercurrent.

            “That sounds almost… galran.” Lance straightened, adjusted his coms to broadcast into the obliging atmosphere. “{Excuse me, are you talking to us?}”

            Shifting again, a third language. He shifted with it- tried to pick something with a familiar cadence. Olkarin- “<Hello! I would like to talk to you, I do not know if you understand me?>”

            Hunk fidgeted in position, glancing around. Lance motioned impatiently- and then, there it was- familiar lilts and shapes. Olkarin. But he could recognize- “ _Yll’thine?_ ”- _understand_. Asking him if he understood, as he had asked her.

            “<Yes! I am sorry, your dialect is a little strange but I understand you, yes. >”

            Silence. He counted the seconds, heart in his throat.

            “<Be it so? >” She sounded rather sad.

            “<Not that much, not that much! I don’t speak Olkarin very often, and you are using fancy old words. I am young and somewhat novice.>”

            “<You are young? >” That was mulled over for a moment. “<Prithee, youth, I would seek to understand.>”

            He wasn’t sure he’d gotten that last bit right. She’d used a different phrase; he thought one of the words sounded similar to ‘eyes’. She would like to open her eyes? Maybe. He stretched his hand over the console, looking for something, a button, maybe. “<What can I do to help?>”

            Something clicked and hummed; his glove caught on the console a moment. He frowned, looked towards it-

            An earsplitting snap; a flare of light, a stinging sensation, first cold, then hot against his skin-

            Then, it was gone. He sat back in the chair a bit heavily, drew his hand back. It throbbed a moment longer, then subsided. He was about to let go of it, before he noticed the dark droplets on his other hand.

            There was a hole in his glove- all the way through the undersuit. Through the gap, a tangle of neat, thin lines, raised as if from a fresh burn, or something under the skin. He pressed on them, discovered it was weeping slightly.

            “ _Oh man,_ ” Hunk’s hand closed over his, rummaging in one of the suit’s pockets. “ _Listen we’re getting out of here, we’ve got to disinfect that-_ ” he pushed a suit patch over the hole, smoothing the tongues with his thumb. Lance, for his part, sat in place.

            He should probably, he concluded after a moment, be worried. Panicking, maybe. That had hurt, and it was unexpected, and if he looked as Hunk pulled him out of the chair, he couldn’t see what on the console had struck him. It seemed smooth, bright, inviting as it had before.

            But there was no particularly discouraging Hunk, who could pretty much haul him bodily towards the door they’d found, especially in light gravity.

            “I do hope I haven’t frightened you,” said the voice from the console.

            Hunk stopped. Looked to Lance.

            “What? No, I just think I cut my hand a little.” He struggled a bit in Hunk’s grip, before looking to the shorter terran with a halfhearted smile. “Really, I’m okay. It’s just a little blood. I’ve got all my shots and everything and you patched the suit, so, it’s not a problem.” He held the afflicted hand up, wiggled it and suppressed the wince. “See? Doesn’t even hurt.”

            “ _You’re a bad liar,_ ” Hunk said, tone bifurcated between fondness and worry. But he let go of Lance’s shoulders, mouth set in his line.

            “Who are you talking to?” the voice asked.

            “Huh? Oh, Hunk- you’ve got to set your speaker on, she can’t hear you.” He leaned back over the console, not quite willing to sit down again, no matter what he’d said to Hunk. “You don’t have visual? There’s two of us here.”

            “…No, I can’t see,” she concluded after a moment. “I know that you’re here, though. I am happy that you’re here.”

            “Happy? Why?”

            Silence.

            “…Are you still there?”

            “I don’t know,” she said.

            That apparently prompted Hunk enough to activate his speaker. “You don’t know if you’re there?”

            “No, what he said earlier. You are the other one, correct?” Something like a hum flickered through the screens. “I do not know why I am happy. I think I like not being alone.”

            Something shifted in Lance’s stomach. Something about the way she said that. “How long have you been alone?”

            “…I do not know. I think it’s been a long time.”

            “Are you trapped?”

            The floor shifted underneath them- just a little. Hunk grabbed Lance’s shoulder again. But when the voice spoke again, it was as if nothing had happened. “Yes. I wasn’t, at first. Just waiting. But now I can’t move.”

            Lance rested his arm on the chair. “Well… do you know where you are? Maybe we can come get you.”

            Another small shift. “Lance, we need to get out of here. This could be the start of an earthquake. Y’know, hypothetical number one? The exact reason I told you that was a bad idea?”

            “I’m sorry.” The voice said. “I don’t know where I am. It’s dark, and I can’t move. There’s something on my back.”

            “Hey- don’t worry about it. Does anything hurt? Are you safe where you are?”

            Another hum, another flicker. “A few aches. And I think so. Nothing is moving unless I try to push it.”

            “Well, don’t do that. It might pull the roof down on you. There’s a lot of people we need to talk to, all right? Our ship’s really close to here. We’ll get help and come back. We just have to leave the asteroid to go talk to them.”

            “You do?” There was a bit of a tremble in her voice.

            “Yeah, I’m really sorry. There’s something down here that messes with our coms. I’ll make it really quick. I promise. Just stay safe, and be careful, okay?” Lance leaned on the chair. “I promise I’ll come right back. Promise.”

            “What is your name?”

            “Lance. I’m Lance, Hunk is the guy with me.”

            “Lance.” She turned the word around thoughtfully. “And Hunk. I will wait. You be careful too.”

            “Yeah. I will.”

* * *

 

            His hand remembered to hurt about halfway back up the drill arm when they took a break to call ahead, though he thought that it definitely wouldn’t have remembered to hurt _this_ much if Guin hadn’t been waiting for him right past the airlock with a first aid kit under his arm and an expression that suggested there was only so much he could refuse the attention.

            That didn’t mean he didn’t try, but Hunk swore he could relay everything without an issue, departing with a pointed “I’ll catch up with you _later_ ,” and then there was nothing to do but get towed to Guin’s room and sit on the bed, peeling back the fabric over his arm. There wasn’t too much to pull away- whatever it did, it had burned right through not just the glove of his suit, but, the lighter one underneath it. There weren’t even scraps of fabric left in the cut.

            Towards its upper edge, it disappeared against the skin of his palm, but on his wrist it showed more clearly: neat pale lines in a grid. A constellation of scabs clung to its leading edge, soft ones that Guin could easily sweep away to clean the cuts themselves.

            Guin peered over it, chewing his lip in a way that made his piercing bob in place. “Huh. What did you _do_ to it?”

            “Nothing. Just caught it on the console. It’s a scrape, Guin.”

            “It doesn’t _look_ like a scrape, it looks like it punched you with something.” Guin’s thumb drew over the skin, lighter when Lance flinched under the touch. “…Yeah, there’s something in there. Pretty sure it’s too deep to fish out. How are your fingers? Numb, sore? Tingling?”

            He flexed his hand a good few times, put his thumb to each fingertip, bent and uncurled the fingers in turn. “Wrist’s mad at me, but that’s it.” He paused, studying his friend for a moment. “…Really, Guin, it’s nothing. I’m not saying that to be tough, but I’ve had shots that hurt worse.”

            Guin seemed to take longer than Lance would’ve liked picking a reply, but, eventually, at least, he smiled, picking a roll of gauze from the kit and securing it tightly. “Well, don’t overstress it and let somebody know if anything changes. I’ll talk to dad, and we’ll see if we have to cut it off.”

            A joke. Good. Whatever was eating him, it wasn’t so unbearable he’d lost his sense of humor. “Oh, say it ain’t so, doc, I’ll have to relearn the ukulele.”

            Guin patted him on the shoulder. “I’ll do what I can, since you’re already down two limbs. Anyway, once I got you cleaned up, the first mate wanted to see you.”

            “On it. Bridge?”

            “No, one of the office rooms, actually. Here, she gave me the cabin number.” Guin tapped his bracelet, bringing up a small furl of screens until he found the one he was looking for and flicked it to Lance. A moment later, Lance’s earpiece chimed.

            “Got it.”

            It wasn’t part of the ship he spent a huge amount of time in, but, he knew the way easily enough to get distracted. He wanted to keep what Guin said in mind, about not overstressing his wrist, but the gauze felt peculiar, to say nothing of the thing lying under it- he kept flexing it, trying to get used to the feeling, how it tugged when he moved, where it rubbed and where it was comfortable. Guin was right- there was something under the skin. He could feel it shift under the gauze.

            Cabin O5 was at the end of the right-hand hallway, guarded valiantly by two of the ship’s cats: Nona, a three-legged tabby that bounced up to him, screaming a rusty hinge’s salutation and immediately requiring attention to the side of her head she couldn’t scratch, and Parness, the fat, tailless lord of all ship cats, completely white except for half of an orange mustache, who merely blinked serenely at him from his position atop a heating register.

            He gave Parness a good pat too, before tapping the call button outside the door. It opened promptly.

            “Oh, McClain. Good.” She motioned into the room. “Have a seat, you’re not in trouble.”

            A consideration that marked her as something of an outsider to the _Emissary_ \- from what Lance recalled, she was a veteran of the industry but on newer, busier ships, ships more formal than this, where the divisions of rank were more cold barriers over which one had to extend themselves. He nodded along, seeing the intention behind it, and plunked himself into a chair. “Did they find her yet?”

            “Who?”

            “The- shoot, I guess I assumed she was a girl. Person on that wreck inside BKG. She talked to us through the ship. I think she was stuck somewhere else.”

            There was a pause he didn’t quite like, as the first mate took her own seat, fingers interlaced and pressed against her mouth. “…We know what Garret told us. There’s a crew down there searching the derelict now, and we’ll hear from them once they get back out of the radiation. I want to know what you saw.”

            “There was a door in the neck-”

            “The _neck_?”

            He frowned, considered his own word. “Ship seems like it’s small compared to us. Cutter-size or smaller. Has two sort of big plated areas, the drill hit one, and past that, it tapered in smaller to another section. It looked like a neck. Northeastern end of it.” He waited until she nodded comprehension to continue. “We couldn’t see the door at first, but I must’ve hit some kind of catch that made it open. We didn’t close it, so it should still be there.”

            Another nod. She was relaxing, shifting papers around the desk, golden eyes half-lidded. He watched her for a bit, wondering what her story was, where she came from. Her complexion was warmer, a reddish undertone making dark fur more of a charcoal color, almost rusty on her face and hands. She dressed loose and comfortable, like a career miner, a gray button-down rolled up to the elbows, sensible dark skirt underneath it. There was a crescent with a single vertical line cutting through it printed on her collarbone, and on her left arm, two rings, a zigzagging line between them, created by careful branding work that left the fur shock white.

            They meant something to the galra, a language in symbols, but, Lance had never gotten to ask what they meant before. He wasn’t sure if it was polite to stare, and lifted his attention back to her eyes when she looked up again.

            “What about the interior? What was that like?”

            “Kinda,” he traced a finger in the air, an inverted ‘T’ shape. “The first hallway was almost cramped. The one that led to the control room was pretty big, and then there was another door leading back. I think we stepped over a hatch at some point, part of the floor sounded weird. Console wasn’t written in any language I was familiar with, which, the voice I heard went through a couple before I found one we could both talk in, and that was this really old dialect of Olkarin. That was about when I hurt my hand,” he held it up, “and a little bit after that she switched to Standard.”

            The first mate’s brows drew together sharply. “…Sorry, that sounds like you _taught_ it Standard.”

            “Huh?”

            “You’re terran, McClain. I’m guessing you don’t start most conversations in archaic Olkarin. You said something in Standard, first, and it didn’t recognize that, but it heard you talking, responded to _that_ , and then after it stung you, it talked in Standard.”

            The first implication of that was that the ship had taken something from him- or, as Guin said, put something _into_ him.

            But, yapping on the heels of that… “But I was talking to someone else inside the ship. That’s not a Koorian vessel, or they wouldn’t have left them down there. And I _speak_ Koor. That’s not one of the languages they tried. So how could they have used the console?”

            “McClain, how sure are you that you were talking to someone?”

            “…Why?”

            “Because you’re right. That ship’s not Koorian. Koorian bodies transmit specific frequencies, like you or me giving off a heat signature. We scan for those. We scan for _vitals_ , too. The whole asteroid. Before we _ever_ put out the drill arm.”

            Lance leaned back, frowning. “So… You’re saying nobody’s down there?”

            “Unless you were talking to a ghost that can use a computer.”

            “But Hunk can back me up- that wasn’t AI, she was- we had a whole conversation. So maybe she’s connecting in from somewhere else-”

            “Through the radiation field? And without hailing the _Emissary_ directly?” The first mate straightened, caught the look in his eye, and sighed, leaning forwards and massaging her temple. “…McClain, I’m sorry. Maybe we overlooked something, maybe I’m wrong. But if the crew makes it back and they can’t find a body- Koorian helmsman or otherwise- I’m gonna need to call this in.” She looked up at him, a bit ruefully. “You’re free to go. Grab some dinner, if you haven’t already; rest of the crew already ate.”

            Nona was waiting to twine around his ankles when he stepped outside, still cordially screeching. Parness had apparently exhausted his patience for the youngster and slunk off in search of a quieter warm spot.

            Lance bent to pet Nona, frowning to himself. If the First Mate was right, then who exactly did you _call_ in this situation?

* * *

 

            Her wedged position was nearly perfect. Feet to one wall, back to another, but not in such a way that she was forced to hold up her own weight, with the structural additions to the shaft that had made the climb up here so difficult now proving a fortuitous seat. From here, chewing softly in frustration on the finger of the glove she’d stuffed in her mouth, she could neatly wire herself back into the power grid just as soon as she could reach that last, aggravating little cable.

            Now, if only she didn’t have to wait four more hours to swipe a meal, if only her stomach didn’t keep reminding her of this with intermittent gurgles and growls loud enough she actually wondered if a passing elevator might hear her, it all would’ve been fine.

            “ _Come on, come on, come on,_ ” she hissed at it in Russian, stretching until her cheek pressed against the wall, knocking the glasses on her brow slightly out of arrangement. “ _Come_ on!”

            Her nail shifted it a millimeter. Then two, then only one again.

            She was _not_ going to cry. She was fifteen, she was fine, she was going to make this work, and she was not going to cry in an elevator shaft because she couldn’t reach a wire.

            “Come _on,_ ” she repeated, and this time it sounded entirely too much like a whimper for comfort.

            Another tiny shift, then-

            Then-

            _Yes_!

            She had to resist the urge to yank as soon as the meat of her finger slid under it. _Deep breaths, Pidge_. Electrical systems did not like to be startled. Sudden moves made for fried scientists, and fried scientists did bad science.

            Easing forwards, ignoring the way her shoulder was starting to protest against the hard piece of metal, or the hair on her arm standing up in the corridor that housed it, easing it past her fingertip to where she could crook and pull. She drew back, careful, careful, long and slow, until finally she was holding it in her hands.

            _Now_ she needed her glove. She pulled it out of her mouth, careful not to lose her grip on the wire, and tugged the glove on until it fit properly. She’d done the hard work of opening this wire earlier- shorting the breaker and re-sealing it with a nice, new little port, homemade, to recharge her device with. It had been risky, but, no one had followed the short back to her location and found the addition she’d made to the wiring, and now, it was paying off.

            _Though, maybe I should’ve put something in there to make it easier to grab._ Mentally, she started picking at what she had to work with, caught herself, and then filed that away for future consideration.

            A green light blinked from the side of her device as soon as she brought the wires to it, flickered to yellow as it charged, and then back to green. She caught herself holding her breath and let it out, tucking the wire back into the crevice and giving it a few good pokes until it settled back down.

            Her arm was filthy now, dust bunnies clinging to her sleeve and she could feel more of it under her glove. It was even worse than the rest of her, which had singlehandedly, thoughtfully swept the interior of the vents up this side.

            That was really not fair. The vents in her action shows were always clean, and she knew they were just shows, but the part that was just show was supposed to be the backflips and getting that close to lava without burning up, not something stupid like how ventilation shafts were actually awful places nobody wanted to spend any amount of time in.

            She drew a breath between her lips, let it pull the lower one where her teeth could catch it and held them there while she climbed. She would just have to be gross for a while longer, because she had work to do, and then she’d steal a shower- a nice one, in one of the empty officer’s rooms- and food. Even if it was just ration cans again.

            She was _not_ going to think about dad’s cooking. She was already doing a good job not crying.

            This part of the shaft didn’t have too many places to put a hand or foot, so she had to create them by pushing back or elbows up against the wall and walking her limbs higher, one at a time. It was relieving when she finally hit a sideways section, and could crawl instead of climbing. She’d tried to stand up in these sections before, and found out the hard way that even if she could, being bent over that far forwards wasn’t a good idea for long-term. Better to crawl.

            She stopped at each intersection to check herself on the map she’d made, make sure she was going the right way; she couldn’t waste time. She’d already wasted time having to charge her device, but if she missed the call, she’d have less to work with.

            Turn right, then left, right again, and then… _There_. She could just faintly see someone through the grating, seated at a desk. Pidge had to squint a while longer before she was sure it was the one she was looking for. There weren’t a lot of galra on the _Emissary_ , but there were still enough of them she could be wrong, but it was her all right- she always wore her hair in the same ponytail. Pidge had gotten used to looking for it through the slats of the vents.

            But she wasn’t making the call, just writing something. Pidge let her stomach rest on the vent floor, frowning. Had she already done it? Had Pidge missed it?

            But no, a moment later she fished her key out, clicked it at the door to lock it, and then produced something from the desk. It was small, for a pierce communicator- she could set it on the surface, had kept it tucked under her feet. It lit up, and the moment later, a garbled screen emerged from the device clipped to her shirt collar.

            Pidge’s hands flew at her own device- copy the signal, don’t interrupt the feed but coax it from the pierce rig over to more than one device.

            “This is Elyzak,” the woman at the desk was saying. “Standard pierce com test, read and respond?”

            “ _Read and respond_.” The voice sounded older and deeper, as much as Pidge could make it out. She didn’t dare play back audio right that second, for fear the woman would hear the echo in the room and try to investigate. “ _It’s good to hear from you again._ ”

            A sigh. “Suppose there’s no chance corporate can get us video on this thing, can it? I feel like a caveman.”

            “ _I believe the last I heard from R &D, the portability of the device and the discretion of the signal requires compromises to be made somewhere._”

            “At least it’s not in the audio quality any more. Last model was like listening to a can phone and hoping an asteroid didn’t hit the wire.”

            Pidge buried the urge to kick the side of the vent as the chatter continued. Don’t _talk_ like that. Don’t _talk_ like you’re just people doing a job.

            Then- “Listen, Raible, much as I love to hear about how your lilies are doing, there’s a reason I’m ruining the airflow in my office right now. It’s about BKG’s payload.”

            A careful pause, something rather unexpected from someone who’d been filling the air a moment ago with the coveted trade secrets of houseplant maintenance. “ _Is that so?_ ”

            “Yeah. We hit core earlier than expected and the arm got stuck on it. Sent some guys down to see what the tangle was and one of them came back acting _weird_. His buddy said he got like that as soon as he got near it. It did _something_ to him- he’s got a wound on one hand and he’s sure there’s someone stuck down there. I know it’s all hush-hush need-to-know, but, I _heard_ the last expedition ran into trouble, and, I think I officially qualify as _need to know_.”

            This time, Pidge wasn’t squirming alone in the silence.

            Then, “ _A wound on one hand, you say? Hm._ ” A small transmitted chuckle. “ _You’re certain he’s up to date on his shots? I understand rusty metal injuries can be quite a hazard_.”

            “Ha _ha_ ,” the woman said dryly. “I don’t think tetanus makes you hallucinate people talking to you. Listen, Raible, I’m _serious_ here.”

            “ _Of course. I don’t mean to suggest I’m not. There is no data from the previous expedition that this sort of thing occurred. The troubles in that expedition were largely personnel side- and did not come with any mysterious injuries that might have caused them. I expect your young crewman might have simply been surprised by the vessel’s intelligence._ ” And then, as if aware of some private joke, “ _I’m certain he’ll come to no harm._ ”

            “Good. I’ll tell Edison the good news, then. Maybe it’ll keep him from wearing out the bearings in his chair.” The woman leaned on the table, sighed, dragged her claws through her mane. “Blood and ancestors, I’m _tired_. I hate these long hauls. It’s Kalzi’s birthday next month and I’m going to miss it hauling some ancient wreck out of a rock.”

            “ _We’ll see what we can do to speed up the process. It shouldn’t be difficult, considering the interest in the material_.”

            Something that felt a lot like a stone set in Pidge’s stomach.

            “I’ll believe it when I see it, but, if you can prove me wrong, that’s one less thing to apologize to my niece about.” She lifted her eyes back to the empty static of the screen. “If you feel like being even more of a miracle worker, smuggle me some tea out here, would you? Personal reserve ran out four weeks ago.”

            “ _I wouldn’t promise in haste, but I’ll see who’s willing to carry a supply shipment as well as reinforcements._ ”

            “Thanks, Raible. Elyzak out.”

            “ _Take care of yourself, dear._ ”

            The office settled into silence. Pidge finished the recording, and closed it. Shower would have to wait. Not food, though; she needed to be alert for this. She had work to do, and if that man was right, only so much of a window to do it in.

* * *

 

            It ended up being later than Lance thought when he finally headed to the cafeteria. The lights had been dimmed in simulation of nighttime, a reminder to keep it down for the sleeping majority. His hand actually barely hurt anymore; he supposed he’d forgotten about it.

            The crew had gotten back. They hadn’t found any trace of the person Lance had spoken to.

            They hadn’t found the door into the ship, either.

            The one Lance had left open.

            Hunk and Guin had both been looking at him when it came up. Hunk’s expression had been easier to deal with than Guin’s- it felt less _pitying_.

            Lance kicked an entirely arbitrary patch of the _Emissary_ ’s floor, without much satisfaction.

            So, what, he hurt his hand on a weird piece of machinery, and Guin was worried he was about to get sung off the ship by sirens like the old ships’ hands warned the young and gullible about?

            No, this was Guin. Guin worried because Guin cared, it didn’t mean he thought Lance was stupid, it just meant-

            Another empty swipe with his leg.

            It just meant Guin didn’t believe him. And all the understanding in the world wasn’t quite taking the hurt out.

            Part of him wanted to be mad at Hunk. He’d been _right there_ , he’d heard the whole thing. But he’d poured his whole heart about this, and hadn’t been convincing. Whatever Hunk had said or kept to himself might not have been enough anyway.

            Especially if nobody else had been able to find their way into that ship.

            That gave him a new thought, one he rolled around in his head as he took the final turn into the cafeteria. It wasn’t like there _wasn’t_ anything strange here. It _was_ weird. Really weird. Maybe the ship really was lost era tech- maybe it, or someone else through it, really was learning from him.

            If that was the case, what happened if he taught it more? Would it learn from just anyone?

            His foot came down with an audible crunch on something, and he had half a second to process that before the unsteady footing shot his legs right out from under him, dropping him a bit harshly on his backside.

            “What the-”

            The culprit, it seemed, was an empty can, as if directly in spite of Lance’s earlier aimless gestures. Well… not entirely empty; maroon ration was leaking slightly out of the foot-shaped indent Lance had just unwittingly planted in it. He knew there was someone up in communications that tended to put half-emptied cans back in the fridge, despite the increasingly passive-aggressive missives from Mrs. Chey tacked to the door about it.

            But this wasn’t the fridge; this was the middle of the floor. What _was_ proximal to the fridge was a distinct shuffling noise, a few small clatters, and a shadow, silhouetted by the fridge’s internal lights that disappeared as the door closed.

            Lance juggled the can thoughtfully. Maybe someone was getting a late-night snack besides him. Maybe someone had just run fresh out of patience for whoever-from-communications’ negligent organization style, and just… threw perfectly usable food on the floor.

            Maybe there was a perfectly good reason why that shadow was now moving slowly and awkwardly towards the wall, away from the door.

             He tossed the can once more, getting a good feel for its weight.

            Then he shifted his feet and took aim.

            It hit the floor in front of the shadow with an echoing bang for such a little thing, and he could tell he’d caught them off-guard by the clatter of things dropping, a cascade of metallic noises. It was a scare, a feint, and Lance’s body followed through, vaulting the counter that separated the food storage from the cafeteria.

            Here, he could see the dropped items were cans, reflecting faintly in the lowered light, but these were new, sealed cans- and in the middle of them, a figure scrabbling clumsily that lurched upright as he hit the ground.

            They were small, he noted, small and lightweight and whatever their approach was, they were fumbling. There was an arm that came up, towards him, which he caught by the wrist, fueling it along with the motion and-

            He was nearly nose-to-nose with a child; pale brown hair, a spatter of freckles, wide eyes, and shaking slightly in his grip.

            Needless to say, he paused.

            In that very instant she sank her foot, hard, into the soft part of his stomach.

            She got him good, to boot, and was running full-tilt towards a dark hole in the wall.

            “Wait! I’m not gonna hurt you!”

            She hesitated, which was good, because, in that period of time she had made it onto the counter, holding onto the grating that usually covered the largest vent in the room, which was now hanging loosely downwards- the clear avenue she’d entered by. But she’d stopped, she was at least considering, that was promising. He flexed a bit of a friendly grimace. “Actually, I think you hurt _me_ pretty good, so, I dunno, should I be begging for mercy instead?”

            Not even a laugh. Tough crowd. But she let go of the vent cover. “Didn’t kick you that hard.”

            He settled back on his heels grinning. “No, I’m dying, you booted my kidneys clean out of my back. They’re gonna need to load me into the fridge to save me.”

            Her gaze flickered guiltily towards the appliance in question, then down to the cans on the floor. She looked back to the vent, seeming to rethink leaving after all.

            That got Lance on his feet, picking up the cans, setting them together for a moment. Outside of the hapless communications officer’s empty lunch, most of the cans were intact; one was leaking a bit from a bottom corner. He grabbed a wipe for that one, wrapped it once around the base and tied it. Looked like she’d tried to grab everything she could carry; week’s worth of food, maybe more if she ate light.

            She’d settled to watch him, but her eyes stayed on the cans. Her mouth was squirming in place, not nervous, but, trying to work its way past an idea she didn’t like, but that refused to be ignored.

            He wondered; went for the leaking can and held it out. “Well, we’re not gonna be able to sneak this one back in there, seal’s broken and all. If you finish it off, we can dump it in the recycler and nobody’ll know.”

            Kid didn’t entirely buy that, from the look she was giving him, but, hunger won most arguments in the end, and she reached for it, confirming his hunch, though her eyes widened as she took it. “Your hand.”

            He glanced at the gauze, back to her. “Yeah, got one on the other side, too,” he wiggled it demonstratively, then looked at it as if he were just noticing his own missing finger. “Well, most of one.”

            That time she at least grunted a little and set about trying to crack the can open. She was wearing electrician’s gloves- sturdy insulated things, and it made it hard. A moment later she simply bit a finger, slid a hand out and pulled the can open properly, before spitting her glove out onto the counter and setting into the can’s contents with a vengeance.

            Weird kid. _Hungry_ kid. He let her have at, piecing together his thoughts. “So,” he said, casual despite the way she jumped when addressed, “you, uh, you alone in there, or do we have a whole kid gang in the vents? Because I’m _pretty_ sure that’s a safety violation.”

            She stared him down around the edge of the can. “…no gang,” she relented, thickly, through a mouthful of ration. She seemed to remember to chew a bit and swallowed. “Just me.”

            “Great!” Well, he’d figured, given how much she’d been trying to take without calling another pair of hands to help her, but it’d make Guin happy to know he hadn’t immediately proven how fine his hand was by dragging it through a gross vent in search of some _other_ kid that needed food. “So, who’s just you?”

            “Pidge,”

            An answer, even if it was trying to be a non-answer, he’d take it. Besides, he supposed if someone had just vaulted a counter to potentially fight him, he wouldn’t trust them an inch either. “I’m Lance.”

            The novelty of the whole thing was intriguing. They didn’t bring kids out on missions like this- not usually at least, not around here or someone would have told him. Which meant she was a stowaway. Which meant she ran the risk of getting caught and getting in trouble for… what?

            He wasn’t too worried about flagging someone down; she was just some kid. Very hungry kid, he thought, cracking a ration can for himself as he watched her nearly finish the first one. But not dangerous, which just brought him back to his earlier question.

            _Pidge_. Dark eyes, so, not colony. Short, freckles, kind of stocky but not in a way that he suspected was used to hauling hard weight.

            She finished her can and eyed the others, before looking back at Lance. “…You are not mad?”

            He was getting a feeling that accent was Russian- good old homegrown Terran language. “Mad that you hit me, or mad that you’re here at all?”

            She fidgeted a bit. “Yes.”

            “Way I see it, getting clocked is the price you pay for ambushing people in the dark. And, yeah, pretty sure you’re not supposed to be around, because anybody here who has kids wouldn’t make their kid steal ration cans at night, or try and stockpile it in the vents.” He also felt like at least half of them would, on closer inspection, keep their kid _cleaner_. Her clothes and the backpack she’d left on the counter were about even levels of filthy.

            “I am not stockpiling in vents,” she grabbed the strap of her backpack and shook it slightly. “In _here_. Cleaner.”

            So she felt about the same way about the vents.

            She continued, setting the can down. “Was going to ask if you are not mad because of hand. You are the one she was talking about, yes?”

            “I’m the one several people talk about,” he leaned to one side, propped his hand under his chin before he realized it was the injured hand. Interesting; he really wasn’t feeling that at all now. “If you’ve heard people talking about that charming handsome young handyman, the fascinating one, that’s me,”

            Another grunt. “One who hurt hand on ship down in asteroid, I meant.”

            Definitely Russian. “That a big deal now?”

            “Galra woman with ponytail seems to think so.”

            He could think of a couple of galra. Could even think of at least two of them that wore their hair up. But, being reasonable, there was one in particular that fit both criteria, and something about her line of questioning had hooked him the wrong way. “Oh yeah? What did she tell you?”

            “She didn’t.” Pidge hopped down to the cans, towing her backpack with her. It was already open- she hesitated, eyeing him, and then put her hand on a can. When he didn’t stop her, it disappeared into the bag and she reached for another. “Overheard,” she said, working quickly. “Calling someone else.”

            _If the crew makes it back and they can’t find a body_ \- _Koorian helmsman or otherwise- I’m gonna need to call this in._

            And they _had_ made it back empty-handed.

            The door slid open. “Lance? You in here?”

            Pidge jumped; Lance motioned for her to stay quiet, grabbing his can and popping to his feet. “Yeah?”

            Hunk cut a nearly eerie figure, the lights of his eyes and the tattoo on his neck casting soft yellow glow against the darkness. “…Why are you on that side of the counter?”

            He draped himself over the countertop. “Because we covet what is forbidden?”

            Hunk had ventured close enough for Lance to make out the face attached to those eyes.

            “Seriously can’t a guy hang out next to the fridge? It’s not like there’s a rule.”

            “I mean, if there was, it wouldn’t stop you.”

            A helpless noise rose behind him.

            Lance couldn’t quite suppress his answering fidget. _Come on, kid, you don’t laugh at two perfectly good jokes but you laugh at Hunk when you’re supposed to be staying quiet_? He eyed Hunk, whose expression hadn’t changed.

            “So, who’s that with you?”

            “I dunno, someone really bad at hiding,” Lance replied, stonefaced.

            “ _HEY_!”

            “Don’t _hey_ me, I made the universal ‘play it cool’ sign at you and you blew it, kiddo.”

            Pidge couldn’t quite clear the counter, so, casually as if stepping off a curb, she simply hopped onto it, her now distinctly lumpy backpack on her shoulders. “All you did was flap hand at me. That is not universal sign for anything.”

            “You’ve never watched a spy movie in your life, have you kid?”

            A hand was raised between them. “Not that this isn’t a fascinating argument with a twelve-year-old,” (“ _Fifteen_ ,”) “fifteen-year-old, but…” Hunk raised his hand a moment before gesturing broadly to take in Pidge’s entire body. “ _Who is this?_ Do you guys just have kids running around here?”

            “Not normally, and we were _getting_ to that part.”

            Pidge swatted Hunk’s hand out of her space. “We were _getting_ to part where Wade is going to steal a ship right from in front of your faces, because you are busy calling me twelve.”

            “Hold on. Wade? _Howard_ Wade? Cogwork Industries Wade?”

            There was something in Hunk’s tone and expression Lance couldn’t place, and he wasn’t wild about the difference. “You know him?”

            Hunk eyed him in turn. “You _don’t_?”

            Another furious swatting motion in the air between them from Pidge. “He is paying both of you!”

            “Wait a minute. You’re telling me…” Hunk pinched the bridge of his nose. “Dammit. Why didn’t I think about subsidiaries?”

            Lance wasn’t sure he was getting the same implication. “So… what’s the deal here? Corporate’s corporate, right? What does this have to do with stealing the derelict?”

            “Technically it’s not stealing, if he owns the company.” Hunk hadn’t lifted his head. “Bar an extant legal claim on BKG- which, if there was, we wouldn’t be out here- the _Emissary_ ’s parent company would have bought the rights to the body and anything in it.”

            “So- what, he’s just gonna send someone else to dig the ship out of there and take it?” Something in that hit Lance the wrong way. If they didn’t find anyone, if the radiation field scrambled communications… “Why does he want it?”

            “Doesn’t matter,” Pidge said sharply. “I came here to stop him, get what he is after before he does. I am going to _do_ that.” She scooted back from the counter, turning to face the shaft. “And _you_ will stay out of my way.”

            He watched her, leaning on the counter; let her get to the wall unit, another surprisingly effortless jump up to that surface. “Who says I don’t want to help?”

            A pause.

            Pidge eyed him. “You do?”

            The look Hunk was giving him was a lot less charitable, but Lance wasn’t looking at him. “Look, nobody _believes_ me, but there’s someone down there. Whether or not anybody can find her. And I’m gonna take a shot in the dark you weren’t looking for me to tell me they decided to take things out of our hands. Something’s _fishy_ here, Hunk.”

            No reply.

            That was fine, Lance thought, focusing his attention on Pidge. “What do we need to do?”

            Pidge caught her breath, looked side to side as if she really hadn’t expected him to take her up on that. “I need to see the ship. Need to find answer for-” her face screwed up, looking away from him. “-something.”

            “I can get you down there. I don’t think the door opens normally.”

            “The door wasn’t _there_ when the second team went down, remember?” Hunk was looking unimpressed.

            Lance just raised his injured hand. “When Guin checked me out, he said there was something in my arm. I’m not a genius, but I’m pretty sure it’s some kind of chip.”

            “Which you didn’t have when it opened the first time.”

            “I had a feeling, though.”

            Hunk didn’t budge. “Feelings don’t open doors.”

            “They do sometimes.”

            “You know what that sounds like? That sounds like a trap. That sounds like something down there is _after_ you.” The precise syllables of Hunk’s words started to snap closer and closer together. “Maybe, just maybe, even if Wade’s running containment, it’s because this thing actually is dangerous. I knew a guy back at Satelia. Full ride scholarship, talked like he was gonna change the universe. We interned on some expedition off Ravoch’s moon, dug up this monolith- _lost era_ , just like your friend down there. He got absolutely obsessed with it. A month in and he wouldn’t even come up to eat, would’ve starved if I hadn’t kept bringing him food. Y’know what happened to him?”

            This was, perhaps, a less restrained face of Hunk than Lance had ever seen before. He drew breath to interject and Hunk had already continued.

            “There was an earthquake. The whole site collapsed on itself. Everybody pulled out of the dig when the shaking started, nobody died _except_ him, because _he went back for his rock_. We didn’t even have enough of him left to ship back home to his folks. And you’re here, and you think the pretty mystery spaceship is so nice, Lance, and you don’t want to leave it alone, and you want to follow some kid nobody knows about down there- I don’t like Wade but y’know what? Maybe he should _have_ it.”

            “No!” Pidge was nearly snarling. She swung her balled fist through the air, not aiming for anything. “Wade does _not_ have this! He shouldn’t! Everyone was _fine_ on Sieja and that was _eight_ months! I don’t care if you are scared! It’s not your problem! You are not helping, anyway!”

            “Wait a second.” Lance put a raised hand in front of each of them, even if he was looking at Pidge. “ _What_ was eight months on Sieja?”

            She looked away from him. The faint light caught the horn-rimmed glasses perched atop her hair. They were a bit loose on her even worn like that, as if they were made for a larger head.

            He wasn’t going to get an answer, and he could feel Hunk getting tenser. “All right. Compromise.”

            Pidge shot him a look of betrayal; Hunk’s eyes flicked to him coldly, unimpressed but listening.

            “I _did_ feel weird going down there. And I think it’s a good kinda weird. But maybe it’s not, maybe it is trying to eat me, and of course I feel good. But you know what? You didn’t feel anything down there, Hunk, and if we’re lucky, Shortstack won’t either.” He held up fingers. “That’s two on one and she’s a mean kicker. So we’re just gonna take an informal little three-AM jaunt, back down to BKG, and we’re gonna find out if I can open the door, we’re gonna find out if the voice is still there, _and_ we’re gonna find out if it’s trying to violently colonize my brain, and this time, swear to God I’ll sit pretty, and not get my hands on anything, until you guys without the weird feeling give it the clear.”

            It was a long time before Hunk shook his head. “Why do I not believe that,” he said, but it was softer. Gentler.

            “Well if I break that promise you can just unscrew my feet and sack carry me out of there. You’ll have to, actually, because, then you have to take me back to Vede to apologize to Abuela because I used the name of the Lord in vain,”

            A sigh from Hunk. “That sounds enough like you I’ll believe it. Fine. Let’s do something incredibly stupid. Not like I haven’t been damage control before.”

            Pidge was lingering by the door, and her expression had not softened even slightly. “Then we are done wasting time? Good. Let’s go already.”

* * *

 

            The return trip was slower than the initial descent. Tethers worked best with even numbers of people, and Pidge’s suit was a different manufacturer and model, one that did not agree with the tether system of Lance’s _or_ Hunk’s, which had between them worked out only a cautious equilibrium the first time they’d spacewalked together.

            As a result, things were a bit stop-and-go; Pidge was determined to push the radius limit as far as possible, as if it would somehow prevent either Lance or Hunk from talking to her with suit-to-suit coms. She didn’t ease her way along slowly as Lance did, or float easily like Hunk- rather, she found something to kick off of and then lurched forwards with astonishing force until the tether snapped taut and left her dangling in rage waiting for them.

            “How is she _doing_ that?” Lance finally aired, the third time she hurtled past them.

            “ _I mean, she’s Baltan_ ,” Hunk said matter-of-factly.

            “Really?”

            “ _She’s fifteen, four feet tall, jumps like a cat, and doesn’t have any augs? Baltan. Could be from another high gravity world, I guess, but-_ ”

            “ _Yes Balto. And four foot_ three _, not four foot_.”

            Hunk gestured triumphantly. He seemed to be rebounding well from the hostility that had seized him back in the cafeteria. Maybe space just made him happy.

            Lance, meanwhile, was trying to sort the specific situational nervousness he had from the general sense of being on the wrong side of the spaceship. He could chalk it most likely up to having too much time to think. He didn’t like that; not that he never thought about things, but he preferred the kind of thinking that happened with one’s hands and feet, and flowed nicely. Still thinking, the kind that chased itself around in circles and yelped ‘what if, what if, what if’, he didn’t like and unfortunately if he didn’t want to think about making his way very slowly down in the middle of space, not quite to BKG’s gravity field yet, he had to sit there with it.

            What if Hunk was right, and this whole thing was wrong, and no one was really down there, just an empty voice.

            What if Hunk was wrong, and she was real, and someone in the universe, someone neither Hunk nor Pidge liked, who was very powerful, wanted to hurt her.

            What if nothing he could do would actually help her in time.

            What if he got back there and she was gone.

            The bandages on his hand itched in a way he was half-sure he’d made up. He didn’t have any good answers for those questions. But, they’d reached gravity now, Pidge plummeting with the force of her jump, boots actually thumping to the surface and turning her head back to squint at them in annoyance.

            Hunk let Lance take the lead, and Pidge was forced into their midst by her tacit refusal to linger behind. It seemed like the other team had cleared the way, so it was more of a straight descent this time.

            Furthermore, the drill arm had been pulled free of the surface- they reached the end of it twenty feet before the shell of the ship. Now, Lance kicked ahead, clearing most of the ship in a low-gravity bound, retracing his steps, over the shoulder, back to the neck.

            There was a closed surface, impassive, showing him nothing. He ran his fingers over it, looking for something. “Come on,” he said, quietly, to the air inside his helmet, digging for any kind of uneven point or surface in the metal, pressing his fingers into the grooves in the neck, across its surface. He forced himself to slow down, stretching to reach the top of each piece and making back-and-forth strokes all the way to the rock, even though he knew it had been about on his eye level before.

            His faceplate clinked as he leaned against the metal, forearms braced against the surface. “Come on, please…” He felt like he should be calling a name. “Please, Blue.”

            Warmth pulsed through the metal against his arms. A voice- familiar, this time in the coms of his helmet. “ _Blue?_ ”

            He stumbled backward, recovered quickly. “Yeah! Yeah, I- _can_ I call you Blue?”

            “ _I like it_.” Then, “ _You came back._ ”

            “Hey, I promised, didn’t I? Blue, listen- there was a door here when we came last time. Do you think you can open it?”

            The seam opened smoothly- two of the folds simply bent apart. Lance looked to Pidge and Hunk- the former was staring, wide-eyed. Lance gestured to them. “You guys first,”

            Blue closed the door behind them, and immediately again, the area pressurized and filled with air. Here, Lance felt more certain, more at ease. He knew he should second-guess that feeling, and tried to keep that in mind, there was a reason he was staying behind Hunk, but his nerves were leaving him, and he needed to chatter to break up what remained. “I guess you only open up for some people, huh? That’s why the other crew didn’t find it.”

            “Other crew?” Blue seemed puzzled.

            Hunk raised his head. “After we got back to the _Emissary_ , they sent a bunch of people down here to try and find you. You didn’t talk to them?” He didn’t sound entirely suspicious.

            “I’m… not sure. After you left, I think I… I think I was asleep. I didn’t hear anything, until you called me. But I haven’t moved. I remembered what you said.”

            Pidge was tracing the patterns on the walls with her fingertips, mesmerized.

            Lance looked up, at the structure overhead. “Did you feel them pull the drill out of your back?”

            Hunk and Pidge both looked towards him quickly. Blue was silent for a time. “…My back? I… suppose it doesn’t hurt as much. Something was in it? A drill?”

            “So you… _are_ the ship.” Hunk shifted, looking around as if he wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

            “Yes.”

            Lance stepped into the control room. “So, Pidge was right.” To Blue, “I brought another friend this time. Is there a way you can see us in here?”

            “Right now, I can’t see anything.” Blue sounded a bit frustrated. “My head is trapped.”

            “Don’t worry, we’ll work on that.” Lance’s hand hovered over the console. He paused, looking back at Hunk.

            After a moment, Lance realized Hunk was wearing a suppressed smile. He tilted his head, looking up to the ceiling. “Hey, uh- Blue. Can you explain the thing in Lance’s hand?”

            “…Yes,” Blue said. “I am- really, I’m sorry, things are… confusing. I’m still trying to sort everything out. I gave him… it’s a key. My key. It’s important.” A bit hastily, “I can take it back, if he doesn’t want it. I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

            “Key?” Pidge seemed to have come out of whatever reverie she was in, staring pointedly at the screen.

            “Yes. I’m guessing you must be Pidge.”

            “Right.” Lance rested his elbows on the chair. “Apparently according to the ventilation commando, over here, some guy named Wade is coming after you.”

            “No,” Pidge said, looking at Lance. “I am thinking he is coming after _you_.”

            “Wait, _what_? That’s not what you said-”

            “That’s not what I thought _then_. But key? That changes things.” She frowned, looked away from him. “This happened before.”

            “Sieja?” Hunk guessed.

            Pidge seemed to hunch a little more. “Yes. Important thing is, Wade will want to take Blue, and, if he knows you have key, he will want to take _you_ , as well.”

            Oh. Well. Didn’t that change a few things.

            “If Lance is in danger, I really should-”

            Lance rested his hand on the console. “Don’t worry about it. Let’s focus on getting you out of here first. Can you move anything?”

            The structure shifted around them. It was about the way it had moved before, but knowing for certain what it meant, it was interesting to think of a very large creature turning in place. “My shoulders, but my legs are trapped. I could do something about the rocks around my head, but they’re holding my jaws shut.”

            “You have legs?” Hunk looked confused.

            “…Should I not?”

            Hunk raised a hand, opened his mouth, and paused. Then, “Y’know? I’m not qualified to disseminate ‘shoulds’ here, but I’m just gonna say most spaceships don’t have legs. Or jaws. Can we get a visual? How much of you is stuck?”

            A screen emerged, rapidly tracing a shape. The silhouette in white, and then blocking in translucent gray masses- the rock around them. Blue was lying on her side; they really _had_ entered by the neck, and just beyond it, a wedge-shaped head. Four legs, and a long, whiplike protrusion on the opposite end from the head; the two sections of blue enamel that they’d traversed were the shoulders and hips, and between them, a pale waist.

            It was Hunk that spoke first. “Looks like a cat. Big cat… lion, maybe? Why would you make something shaped like that? Uh, no offense, Blue.”

            “It’s a good shape,” Blue said simply. “It’s served me well.” Another shift. “Though, perhaps not so much right now.”

            “Yeah, it’s kind of a pity, if you were shaped more like an excavator, then-”

            “Wait! One of my back legs can move.” There was a faint, distant rumble. “Yes- this stone isn’t too hard. I think it’s resting in mostly clay. I can dig a bit there.”

            “ _Mr. Garrett_ ,” a low voice sounded in the coms.

            Lance jumped. “Captain Edison?”

            “ _Ah. So Mr. McClain is with you._ ” The captain did not sound entirely surprised.

            “You’ve been looking for us?” There were over five hundred people on the _Emissary_. There wasn’t much of a reason why the captain would so promptly notice two people absent, especially when he shouldn’t even be awake at this hour.

            “And, how did you contact us through the field?”

            A pause. “ _You are on the ship, then._ ”

            Lance shared a silent wince with Hunk. “Listen, Captain, this whole thing’s kind of a mess. The ship is- it’s not what we thought it was at all, we need to-”

            “ _I understand. There is a reason an armed convoy is approaching the site. Mr. McClain, Mr. Garrett, we have been ordered to withdraw the_ Emissary _from the site. Please return._ ”

            It didn’t pass into either coms or speaker, but Pidge’s face crumpled like she was hissing angrily through her teeth.

            They were here already?

            “I have my other leg!” Blue sounded triumphant. “My back legs and my tail.”

            Lance looked at the screen. He touched his coms again. “There has to be something you can do, Captain. This is wrong. The ship is alive.”

            “ _Mr. McClain. Please. The matter is out of our hands. We need you to return before we can move the ship._ ”

            “…Lance? Is… everything okay?”

            “ _Mr. McClain_. _I do not know what I am going to tell your mother if I don’t bring you home._ ”

            “…Tell her I’m sorry.” He turned the coms off. “Bad news, Blue, we’ve got a shorter timeline than we thought. What can you do to speed this up?”

            “There’s a cannon on my tail, but I’d need help bringing it online.”

            “On it,” Lance vaulted into the seat, hesitating, looking up at Hunk. “I think I really need that clearer head okay right now.”

            Hunk’s mouth set in a line. He lifted his head. “Hey, Blue? I’m going to try and dig out your head. I’m trusting you on this, and I don’t care if you’re a spaceship, if you make me regret it, the feeling’s gonna be mutual.”

            A brief pause. “Thank you, Hunk.”

            Hunk nodded, firmly, and headed out.

            Lance redirected his attention to the console. It spread around the chair as a broad semicircle of panels, set beneath a wide, dark screen. Set low in front of him, even with the armrests of the chair, were two small openings with handles inside. They settled easily into his grip, and as he shifted, he felt them catch, a sense of something responding. Warmth flooded up his left arm, something in the aperture pressing against the key.

            He could feel a sense of where they were- the base of Blue’s head, above the jaw. From there it was as if her whole spine lit up. He could feel her claws catch a piece of stone, scrabble at it, try to pry it loose, with a sense very much like muscle and sinew flexing. Her metal skin shifted over itself in a thousand places. The tail was heavy, crowned with something that felt nearly like a club. This, too, he could feel- humming and buzzing with strange electricity, and something towards one end that felt like an aperture- a muzzle.

            He turned the left handle and pulled back. It came forwards on a track that joined to the armrest. The tail swung around, pressed itself to the confining stone.

            “Hunk, head’s up, I’m about to try something,”

            He could feel _him_ , too- perched back from the cockpit, behind what felt like Blue’s left ear, a faint, scratchy sensation of the boots on her skin. “ _Try what, exactly_?”

            The handle had a button. He struck it with his thumb. “This.”

            The whole asteroid shuddered. He felt stones and dirt rain up and down Blue’s suddenly freer right side. It settled, again, but when Blue rolled her shoulder, Lance felt it shift enough. It was open- she rocked in place, trying to figure out how to position her forelimb to pull it into the new gap.

            Lance aimed the tail lower and shot again, then a third time. That freed things as far as the elbow, but it also caused Blue to tip sideways, startling Pidge with a yelp. Hunk staggered from his perch, but held his footing. “ _Okay, yeah, warning appreciated,_ ”

            “Sorry! Still getting the hang of this.”

            “We both are,” Blue said. “Which is… odd, because I’m sure I’ve done this before.”

            “We’ll figure it out,” Lance said, feeling Hunk shift a piece of rubble off Blue’s brow. Light and dirt flickered across the screen, a crack in the covering stone. More gently, Blue found purchase with her freed leg, but didn’t immediately kick and dig with it. With her other, she flexed her claws experimentally, found something in the ground shifting, that perhaps that, too, she could pull free.

            Hunk cleared a bit more of the screen, enough Lance could see him, a familiar shape that stopped, turned his head. “ _Lance? They’re retracting the drill arm._ ”

            Which meant they were low on time. “How fast do you think you can get the mouth free?”

            “ _Not fast enough. I mean, if I specifically dig out the lower jaw, maybe? This thing’s huge. I don’t suppose there’s a way you can try and loosen this up?_ ”

            Blue squirmed in place. “If he can dig behind my jaw…”

            “ _On it_.” Hunk swung out of view.

            Lance focused on working the controls back and forth, trying to pull Blue’s remaining leg out. He curved the tail over Blue’s back, shot a few times at the rock in front. One showered down dirt, blocking the window of vision that Hunk had opened, but still, it felt looser.

            Pidge had pulled up screens from her device, tapping furiously. “Three ships, one Carrier, two Falchions.”

            Hunk swore in the coms. Lance looked to Pidge. “Uh, what’s a Falchion?”

            “Fighter ship. Fast. Powerful. They were expecting trouble.”

            BKG’s body creaked soundlessly; he could feel it shift through Blue. Stones began to drop into the opening.

            “Hunk, get back in here. I think they’re shooting at us.”

            He felt Hunk move away from the door- towards the other side of the jaw. “ _I’ve almost got it._ ”

            “Come on, Hunk, you’re supposed to be the reasonable one here.” More shaking. “What happened to hypothetical number one?”

            He didn’t answer. This time, the whole asteroid shuddered. It shifted and cracked over Blue’s head. All four feet were free, crouched, folded.

            “Hunk, Hunk- I will- I _will_ get sappy on you, Seidou Garrett, don’t make me get sappy.”

            “Lance? I think I can open my mouth now.”

            Hunk still hadn’t said anything. Lance tightened his grip on the controls. “Hunk, buddy, you need to get out of there!”

            Rapid fire pelted down on them. But he could feel, surely enough, Hunk trying to climb the other side of the jaw, towards the neck.

            Closer. Blue bent her neck, turning it so the stones falling glanced off it, and not Hunk.

            “Falchions have visual!” Pidge declared.

            “Great! What does that mean?”

            “It means they can shoot us _directly_ now!”

            There was energy building inside Blue’s mouth. He could almost taste it, looking ahead through the half-darkened screen.

            Pidge grabbed his arm. “We need to move!”

            “Not without Hunk!”

            The door opened behind them.

            “Aww, you _did_ get sappy on me.”

            Lance grinned, and slammed the throttles forwards.

            Blue roared. It reverberated throughout her body, and spat pale vapor forwards into the rock. Frost bloomed, veins of it that dug deep and cracked, spread further, forced the stone apart. A moment later she drew power a second time… and fired a jet of steam into the same cracks.

            BKG had endured the hammer of exposed space for millennia, but that hammer had been consistent, unyielding and unchanging. What it experienced now, ferried by moisture, was a radical shift in a matter of seconds.

            The entire northern end of the asteroid exploded in floating shards; Blue pushed with all four feet, lateral thrusters in her hips and back firing all at once and then, all at once, they were out, out in the void of space.

            Blue didn’t fear it. She swam through the emptiness easily, freely, sweeping in a broad arc. Overhead, distant, the great blocky shadow of the _Emissary_ ; its nose was pointed away from them.

            Closer, what must be the Falchions- slender pointed things, half Blue’s size with a broad, upward-sweeping brow. They came around quickly, between Blue and the chubby, smooth shape of a third ship. Points of light gleamed, and they rained emerald fire.

            Blue jibed hard to one side, but not quite enough; one shot slammed into her shoulder. Lance felt it as if it were on his own body, a searing point that sunk into the muscle of his back. He hissed through his teeth, and pushed hard, trying to put distance between them.

            Another shot glanced Blue’s hip, but the space between them was increasing.

            Pidge grabbed his arm. “This isn’t working! They can shoot you as long as you are in a straight line from them!”

            “Got it, so get a barrier.” He yanked hard with his right hand, pushing the left forwards until it clicked; Blue pulled into a hard-angled dive, down and under what was left of BKG and then up again.

            He could still feel the two shots they’d already taken. And the Falchions were quick- he could already start to see them around the asteroid. “Blue, we need to get out of here. Any bright ideas?”

            “I- I don’t know. I was in there long enough, anywhere I can think of might not even be there anymore.”

            “Well, that’s more of an idea than I have!”

            Something chirped on the screen. “Wait.”

            There were motes of light in the sky, now- too close and too small to be stars. They traced a shape, a pattern. To Blue, he could feel that it seemed familiar; a trustworthy sort of force, tugging gently on Blue’s hull. It seemed to weave ahead, something like a bridge, a pathway made of light stretching into the distance.

            “Someone…” Blue sounded nearly dreamlike. “Someone made this for us. For me. They’re asking… they’re asking me to come home.”

            Lance looked to Hunk, to Pidge. Hunk looked like he’d seen something incredible; Pidge looked more confused than anything, brows drawn sharply over wide eyes. Hunk nodded quickly, firmly; Pidge eyed him, hesitated, frowned; conceded.

            Lance throttled forwards, and the sky melted away into white.

* * *

 

            On the bridge of the FSS _Rubria_ , the first mate swore as soon as their eyes were clear. “The fuck was that?”

            It was not a question that warranted an answer, but, he expected they all might be more settled with one given. “An ancient vessel from a lost civilization _would_ be capable of a few tricks, one assumes.”

            “There was nothing about that in the dossier on specimen one,” another voice offered, petulant. Her hands flew across the screen, bringing up a battery of scans. “…It’s just gone. That quickly. And how the hell did they even know we were coming? The _Emissary_ captain just said two guys went missing.”

            That caught his attention. “Two people from the _Emissary_ ’s crew?”

            Someone else was watching him. He glanced over his shoulder, leaned slightly on his cane. “Is there a concern, Miss Wade?”

            The young terran leaning against the far wall tilted her head. “What’re you thinking about, Raible?”

            It was more of an interrogation than it pretended to be.

            He flexed a smile. “I am thinking something very interesting is beginning to happen. Don’t you?”

            Miss Wade merely snorted.

            “Well, I don’t know about either of you,” the first mate folded their arms, “but _I’m_ thinking Gerry’s the one who gets to break the news to her old man, since she’s the least likely to get fired over it.”

            The _Rubria_ ’s crew scrambled, then; focusing on the intake of the two Falchions, course reevaluation, investigation of the _Emissary_ and its crew.

            Raible lingered where he was, and was not troubled, on account of being an old man with a bad leg.

            And, in the way of old men, he watched the patch of darkness between the stars and reminisced.


	2. The Exhumed

            The Ukryty Glacier stretched over eight hundred miles south of Grave, all the way down to where it emptied inexorably into the Sea of Wights. Despite its head lying so close to a major city, it lay in relative countryside; few clans would settle this far out.

            It was still a marvel to behold, shining pale in the dim light of Gal’s faded star, more like a mountain range than something moving and breathing, flowing with the thaw and freeze.

            “Incredible.”

            Stepping off the tracksled that had taken them this far, Goraz chuffed. “Getting starstruck on us already, rookie?”

            A breath of mist escaped Keith through the scarf over his mouth and nose. “And you’re _not_?” He had to hurry to keep up- Goraz had almost twice the stride he did. “I mean- look at this. It’s amazing. This is the biggest glacier in three galaxies.”

            A flash of teeth, more joking than any real threat. Goraz didn’t ‘believe’ in tucking scarves around his field gear. Which, perhaps, if Keith had a mane and beard half as thick as that, he wouldn’t either. “Ah, yes, the pride of any black-blooded galra,” he drew himself up, rolling baritone carrying forth as if he were reciting poetry, “colder than _anywhere_ else in the known universe!” A firm hand clapped on Keith’s back, the other unfurled, grandiose, to take in the Ukryty. “Gape in awe, youngling, at the glory of the nine kingdoms: the ice cube of _lords_!”

            Laughter took them both. Ilun passed them, shaking her head; she was even more swaddled than Keith was- between goggles, helmet, and scarf there wasn’t a swatch of fur visible. “If you jokers make me carry all this to base camp myself, I’m eating your lunch for you.”

            That reminded him where he was, and that there were a bunch of bags still waiting on the sled. He hiked one onto his shoulders, set the straps, and cast one more look up at the glacier as they approached.

            It really was beautiful, even if Goraz thought that was funny.

            The mess and storage tents had already been pitched, and the familiar bulky shadow of Mav was in the process of pitching the sleeper. She wagged the hammer she was using to pound the stakes in at them, then went right back to working, not looking up. Once all three of them could form a windbreak, they’d stretch the roof, and build a fire. Without it, it wasn’t much warmer in the storage tent, but, Vrek seemed to prefer it to the outside, as he was perched there, engrossed in the screens from his device.

            “Where’s Auntie?” Keith asked, as he put down the satchel.

            “Getting an early look at the site. Heading down to see her? I might come with you. Blood knows I need something to do to avoid freezing out here.” Vrek closed the screens, looking to Goraz. “This all of it?”

            Goraz had set down two bags, each the size of the one Keith had carried, and was heading out the tent flap. “Bout four or five more. Ilun and I can handle it. Let the baby have his Auntie.”

            Keith suppressed a huff at being pronounced ‘the baby’. Knowing Goraz, though, he didn’t say anything until they were beyond camp, heading towards the ropes that led down into the chasm. “You’re only five years older than me, but _I’m_ the baby.”

            Vrek’s head cocked in amusement. “You kidding? I was ‘rookie’ until the day you signed on, practically. You only escape being the whelp of the team once you either do something impressive or a _smaller_ baby shows up. Don’t take it personally.” He crouched, checked the ropes with a few tugs before hooking his grapple onto them. “Besides, they’re being hard on you since they know Commander won’t.” He leaned over the gap, raising his voice. “Two for down!”

            “Oh, so it’s just one of those life experience things.” Keith waited until Vrek had kicked off and had gotten a good start before he hooked onto a clip himself, swinging his body freely into the space. “Great. Just like boot camp.”

            “No, this is worse than boot camp, you’re doing actual work.”

            Rappelling down the canyon took more of their focus, enough that they didn’t keep chattering after that. This was mostly ice sheet- very little rock in it. Sometime in Gal’s long-distant greener times, this was Ukryty’s river valley. For a moment, Keith tried to imagine how it might have looked: a broad plain of snow, stretching as far as the eye could see, shallow and close to a large enough water source that grass, maybe even flowers poked through; a rare fortune in greenery, paved with neat little paths, the crown of the-

            He hit the bottom with a thump, stumbled a bit on the dismount.

            “Head in the wind, there, Keith?” Vrek sounded amused.

            “Shut up,” he focused on unclipping his tether, and sped up across the ice, walking ahead of Vrek towards a familiar patch of brightness in the shadows of the canyon.

            It was impossible to miss Auntie. She was short, for a pureblood galra, her usual eye-smarting red coat wrapped over her armor. She’d brought a heavy lightstone torch, a gloved hand balled around its handle. Her face was pointed at the cave, but, a moment later, she turned her head, hearing them arrive. Like Goraz, she left her mouth and nose uncovered- unlike him, she had a single, small stripe of beard from her lower lip to her chin, the rest of her face only covered by thin pelt. It was merely personal fortitude. “Kethe,”

            Keith checked his approach, nodding shallowly. “Auntie,”

            “I’m here too,” Vrek chimed.

            Auntie leveled him a suppressed smile. Keith smiled, too, but he found his attention dragged towards the fissure in the ice. “…See anything yet?”

            “Well. Given we’re not heading in until tomorrow, not really. Drone footage is something, though. Seems like it’s a big structure, but intact and recent enough that it’s got working security doors, so we’ll have to see what we can do once we get in there.”

            Vrek chortled conspiratorially, rubbing his gloved hands together. “What do you expect? Technology’s amazing, but, end of the day, you want something done right, you get Crows on the ground. Otherwise, between Earth and Olkarion, we’d all be out of a job.”

            Auntie snorted. “They can _try_ ,” she said, in much the same tone she’d said when Keith had been ten, and she had said that he could _try_ to attempt a full takedown on her.

            They settled comfortably into silence. Vrek continued to fidget on the spot, trying not to freeze. Keith didn’t know him that well, but he knew Vrek was from Fourth Kingdom, on the other side of the Sea of Wights. “Is it really _that_ cold?”

            “You’re the guy with no fur, you tell me.”

            “I’ve got _some_. I’m not _naked_.”

            Vrek seemed to sense some reproach in Keith’s tone, or, else, he just let the topic slide for another reason. “Here’s just hoping it’s warmer inside, because if it _isn’t_ , blood and honor and all, but you’re gonna need to pack me in snow and load me onto the tracksled so they can thaw me out back home.”

            “Spoken like someone from Karvengard,” Auntie said warmly. “Anyway, Kethe, get a look at this.” She moved closer, held up the torch so he could make out the dark shape inside the ice.

            He obliged. “…Funeral lantern?”

            It stood nearly twice his height, the brazier overhead carved to keep the wind from the flame it might have held. But that was useless, here; it lay almost fully encased, only the leading edge of the brazier protruding into open air.

            He wondered who might have tended this lantern, how long it had been there. Who it had been raised in memory of.

            “Funny thing to have out here, isn’t it?” Auntie’s knuckles rapped the exposed part of the brazier. “There probably wasn’t a whole village here or we’d have found more under the ice.”

            “Or, maybe there is, and we just haven’t had a quake deep enough to crack it open. That’s the fun thing about Vervendark, anywhere you go in this country you’re probably standing on dead people.”

            Keith shuddered at that description. “Can you phrase that some other way, please?”

            Auntie’s hand clapped on his shoulder. “Better get used to it now, Kethe, we’re going to find a lot more in there.”

            That caught his attention. “It might’ve been abandoned.”

            “Big old estate like that with a funeral lantern out front? Not likely.” Vrek seemed to follow Auntie’s thinking easily. “Smells like thick blood to me. Proud old clans, you know how they are, they don’t uproot if they can help it. The kind that’d sooner die in their house than live and protect their children.”

            A call came from over the ravine, wordless across the distance. Vrek howled back, then looked back to Keith and Auntie. “Sounds like we’re needed.”

            And just that easily, Vrek had gone ahead, like he hadn’t given Keith more to think about than he wanted for the rest of the week.

            “Is he just like that?”

            “We’re all a little bit like that.” Auntie didn’t sound concerned. “Comes with the territory. We’re Crows. We go where the Nine need eyes. You get used to being a witness.”

            “Well, I’m not.”

            “Not yet. It’s a learning process. Vrek talks tough because he’s seen a few bodies. He threw up the first time he saw a really ugly scene. Goraz and Mav both lost sleep at their firsts. We live close to death, Kethe. We have since our ancestors were sleeping in ice warrens. That doesn’t mean it’s comfortable for any of us.”

            It was consoling, but, he wasn’t sure how he felt about the idea of the squad coddling him. “I’ll be ready by tomorrow. Just like grandma’s funeral, right?”

            “You and I remember my mom’s funeral very differently.”

            It was a joke, but even then, it lightened the thin air, warmed them as they headed back to the ropes, back to camp.

            He realized only far later that he’d never gotten to ask her why she’d been staring at the cave, the meaning behind the stern, angry look she’d worn.

~

            “- _Kethe!_ Tyrant’s ass, Rookie, pull it together!”

            Keith woke with a start, having been jostled so hard he was nearly shoved forward off his feet. Ilun was staring at him, her features twisted halfway to a snarl, grabbing his shoulder uncomfortably hard.

            Half the unit was gathered around him- Vrek didn’t seem to be here, and there was no sign of Auntie. He would’ve looked for her, but a moment later Ilun shook him again, both shoulders this time.        

            “All right! All right!” He struggled out of her grip, raised his hands defensively and took a step back. “I’m up, what’s the big-”

            The bare pads of his foot hit smooth stone. Water dripped somewhere nearby. It was warm where they were, but they were all underdressed- he was still in his PJs, his feet stinging like he’d walked on ice.

            They were in the cave. The excavation site. He was about to ask Ilun if this was some kind of exercise in hazing- but stopped at the fear in her eyes. “…What happened?”

            She exploded. “What _happened_? We’re supposed to be asking _you_ that question! Were you completely out of your mind?! What are you doing in here? You didn’t even put your _gear_ on!” Her palm cuffed him hard in the shoulder, would’ve done so again if Mav hadn’t caught it quickly.

            The larger galra shook her head, quietly, and turned her attention to Keith with attentive eyes before signing.

            _What do you remember_?

            He stiffened. Ilun could be sharp, could lose her temper- Ilun shouting didn’t always warrant an emergency. But on top of the eerie atmosphere, Mav was tense. He checked his first response, and answered Mav slowly and carefully.

            “Had kind of a headache… went to bed early after dinner, and then I guess I woke up sometime in the night.” He could recall that, murkily, now that he was thinking about it- “there was something down in the canyon. Light and singing.”

            “And you didn’t tell anyone or-” Ilun was halted, again, by Mav, who brushed her hand to the side of Keith’s head, pressed her thumb against the back of his ear.

            On reflex, he surrendered to the gesture. It was a familiar one, how any caretaker took a child’s temperature. In the moment, he didn’t even mind that Mav was babying him, in essence.

            It was more troubling the insinuation that she was worried he might be feverish. “…None of you saw the lights?”

            “We didn’t hear or see a damn thing until Commander hauled us all out of the tent by our ears because you were missing.”

            _Kethe, why did you go out? You didn’t even wrap your feet._

            That was- a good question. He would’ve remembered the hurt of the ice, shivering in inadequate layers. And he would’ve woken up _someone_ \- he slept close to the heart of the group. “…I think I was sleepwalking. Or not asleep, but…”

            Suddenly something was crawling in his stomach. The depths of the cavern felt like nothing as much as a hungry mouth, yawning towards them. “I need to get out of here.”

            Mav had brought a rescue blanket. Between her and Ilun, they cocooned him, and Mav secured him on her back. It was safe, soothing, but, he didn’t remotely feel like falling asleep the whole way up and back to the camp.

            Auntie was waiting there, with her coat and wrappings thrown on over her PJs, and it hurt him to see her like that, the way she rushed over, checked his temperature, had to force herself to slow down long enough to get them both back into the sleeping tent, where she sat him down and made him explain everything again, the way he had to Mav.

            He hadn’t been gone long, which was a favor in and of itself- his bare hands and face were flushed from the cold, and they prickled as they warmed. Longer in the cave and he would’ve gotten frostbite, or… possibly gone further inside to avoid it.

            Somehow, that second option seemed worse to him.

            Mav helped wrap the ice burns on his feet, but they stayed awake for a long time.

            “Could be some kind of trap.” Vrek spoke in an undertone. “If we send back to Grave tonight, we can get a witch out here, see what _they_ make of it. We should’ve had one with us in the first place.”

            “The hell do you think we can say that’ll get a witch that fast? That our Rookie wandered off like a lost cub in the middle of the night?” Ilun was sharp.

            Keith wilted a little.

            “Vrek’s right.” Auntie’s tone had a thread of warning growl. “This wasn’t normal.”

            Ilun threw up her hands. “I’m not saying it _was_! I’m saying, how are we going to convince anybody who wasn’t _there_ and doesn’t _know_ the kid? You remember how hard of a time it was convincing someone Vrek wasn’t just getting the first mission jitters when he was hearing something creaking in the vents? They all felt sorry when we showed them the dead tundra crawler, but if we hadn’t forked that thing over, they wouldn’t have believed us.”

            “So what do you want me to do, Ilun, send us in blind and hope we all come back out?”

            “It might not give us a choice.”

            All heads turned towards Goraz.

            “ _Something_ got in Rookie’s head. I’ve had ice burns before. You _feel_ that. Doesn’t matter how deep a sleeper you are, and- Rookie? You’re not a deep sleeper. It’d wake you up like someone put a hot coal on the base of your tail. This time, it was just him. How do we know we’re not next? We stay on this ice, we’re gambling. Maybe I can cast the stones for me, but for everyone?”

            Keith sat up sharply. “I’m not leaving Auntie.”

Ilun huffed, somewhere between irritated, scared, and pleased. “You have to ask, old timer?”

            “Where so ever the blood flows, go I.” Leave it to Vrek to quote poetry at a time like this.

            _We’re Crows. Where one goes, we all go._ Mav had the resolve of granite.

            The fire cast deep shadows on Auntie’s face.

            “…We sleep in shifts. Four down, two awake. You see _anything_ strange, you raise hell like it’s the Liberation of Gavrok Peak. In the morning, Kethe, Vrek, you’re taking the sled to Grave. Get a witch. I know what you just said,” she caught the breath of protest he’d drawn, “and you’re not abandoning me. We need to know what we’re dealing with, and we need some fast legs to get the word out. All right?”

            She had the power to order him. She was trying not to resort to that. He lowered his head. “Yes, Auntie.”

            Predictably, they all slept uneasily. Ilun and Mav took first shift. Keith was drifting in wakefulness when Goraz and Auntie got up to replace them- saw their hands moving as they talked. After a moment, the large shape of Mav settling down near the edge of the group with a long sigh; Ilun, with more ease, picked her way over Vrek and settled next to him. Her eyes flicked towards Keith, raised a brow at having caught him awake. Her hands flicked: _Can’t sleep, rookie?_

            How she could find the energy to tease him at a time like this, he might never know. _Think I’ve done enough sleeping tonight._

            _You say that and your aunt’s going to swaddle you. Don’t want you dozing off on the sled tomorrow, right?_

            _I’ll try_ , was all he wanted to promise.

            He found himself counting breaths a few times in the night- Ilun in front of him, Vrek, just a bit nasal; Mav snored softly. Goraz and Auntie remained silhouetted against the fire. He woke up once with a start to see that they were gone, and then, a moment later, they came back into view, sat down cautiously in front of the tent opening once again.

            It was too long after then that his heart stopped hammering in his chest.

            At some point, he must have finally gone several hours, because dawn was breaking faintly over the tents. Mav and Ilun were already up. The former had her hand on Goraz’s shoulder; Auntie was talking to Ilun on the other side of the fire, close to the mess tent. Ilun seemed upset.

            Keith shot up and forgot his ice-burned feet for a moment. They reminded him long enough to pull his boots on over the bandages- that would be enough for wrapping. “Where’s Vrek?”

            Goraz startled a bit. He let out a breath when he saw Keith, jerked his head towards the mess tent. “In there. He’s fine.”

            The relief he might’ve felt was atrophied fairly heavily by the look on Goraz’s face. “…What happened?”

            Goraz dragged a hand down his face. “…You said something about light in the canyon, right? Light and sound?”

            “Yeah?”

            “We saw it.” Auntie had finished talking to Ilun and come over. “Last night. Both of us.”

            Vrek joined the conversation too, having come out of the mess tent. “Didn’t you notice they didn’t wake us up for third shift?”

            Goraz was massaging his temples. “Didn’t trust the damn thing to take my eyes off it.”

            “Well,” Auntie sounded tired, “we got Ilun’s evidence.”

            Keith sat down a bit heavily across from the fire. Vrek pushed a can of ration into his hands. “Here,” he said, giving Keith a look that made it clear this was a suggestion to _not_ ask the question that had been on the tip of his tongue. “We’ve got to stay fresh.”

            They ate, and Keith dressed; Vrek got the sled ready. Keith dawdled, talking to Auntie for a while longer.

            “If it gets worse than it was, you’ll set off a flare, right?”

            She chuffed, ruffled his hair under the hood. “Listen to you, worrying about me like I’m an old widow.”

            When he didn’t move at the contact, she frowned at him, her expression turning serious. “I’m not gonna let the damn thing sneak up on me, all right? If I have to lose a night of sleep or two, so be it.”

            “…Just promise me you’ll set off the flare.”

            She put two fingertips between her collarbones, where her clan mark was. “On the ancestors’ graves.”

            Then, and only then, he got onto the sled.

            It was a new sled- state-of-the-art, hummed across the ice more than whistled or scraped. Only the snap of the wind kept Keith from being alone with his thoughts. He prodded his worries until they were a bonfire, kept that in resolve. He couldn’t let Auntie down.

            When they arrived at the station, the station workers gave the two of them confused looks. “What’s got you two back so early? Forget your toothbrush?” one of them cackled, an aging woman missing significant patches of fur.

            “The expedition’s in trouble. We need a witch.”

            Keith found himself the center of a semicircle of eyes- never a position he liked. That carefully cultivated blaze of resolve withered and died.

            “…Some kinda trouble if they only sent the kids and didn’t use an SOS flare,” one of them grumbled.

            Vrek stepped forwards, opening his coat to show the emblazoned badge on his chestplate. “We’re two Crows with a high security concern that may affect all of Grave. You jokers want to quit jawing and tell central we’re coming to see them?”

            He didn’t wait for the crowd to disperse, but moved through them without a look back.

            Keith jogged in his wake, waiting until they were well away from the station. “…You really mean that?”

            Vrek glanced at him. “…Right, you slept in. Goraz and Commander tell you what they saw last night?”

            “You stopped me from asking.” Keith said flatly, but his irritation was being swept away by the tide of his concern, and curiosity. “And I didn’t remember it clearly when it happened to me.”

            By then, they’d reached the end of the stairs that appended the station to the main streets. There were civilians here, albeit a bit less because of how early it was. Vrek gave Keith a look. “We’ll talk later. Discretion.”

            Grave was an old city. Its layout had been set before the advent of larger vehicles, so its paths were all for walking, running, and cycling, overwhelmingly; the occasional powered chair or the passing overhead shadow of a monorail were the only real disruptions. Vrek hailed a taxi, and no sooner had they both piled into the backseat than the cyclist took off for central command.

            The traditional war hall whose steps they were dropped in front of still cast a distinguished silhouette over the grand avenue before it, but the hindquarters the building crouched upon were deceptively modern. It was those rear buildings they headed towards- the war hall may have been Grave’s beating heart, but these were its thinking, bureaucratic mind.

            The receptionist was a foreigner- a Koorian. Her body protruded from the wall on a short metal arm, a broad circular structure with a single, central eye and around it, a number of arms that looked like nothing as much as thin plastic tubes, a few of them ending in different sorts of graspers. With these, she was painstakingly assembling a rather complex octagonal tower out of playing cards on an unoccupied swathe of her desk, rather than visibly doing work.

            Her eye drifted up to regard them as they approached. Six of the graspers cautiously freed themselves from her card tower and wove themselves, one on top of the other. “Hello, do you have a prior appointment?”

            Vrek huffed. “We might, if the station workers worked very fast.”

            The receptionist did not have a face in any way like Keith was used to, but her iris rotated, constricted, and then widened, in a mesmerizing movement of the tiny, fragile electronics that composed it. “Ah. You would be those two, then. Could you describe the nature of your situation in somewhat greater detail?” She spoke with a very strange accent- pronouncing every word slightly detached from the ones preceding and following it, as if they had been gathered together from different sources.

            Keith made an attempt to gather what he had experienced into a way that didn’t sound very stupid, and the already waning embers of his confidence blew out slightly, replaced with a growing sense of desperation.

            Vrek, however, seemed unfazed. “Less than twenty-four hours since we arrived on-site we were hit by a class two anomaly that seems to be advancing into a class three. Youngest member of the team was affected and lured into the site and in the following twenty-four hours this phenomenon nearly repeated itself with an older member of the team. Anomalous occurrences appear to be a sort of advanced sleepwalking correlated with, and possibly delivered via, apparitions of dead soldiers and war instruments. In the initial occurrence, they were localized in the site; when the occurrence repeated itself, they seemed to be climbing the walls.”

            The receptionist took this in again with rapid, complex, and inscrutable movements of her iris. Keith, meanwhile, was actively gaping at Vrek and the nonchalant, clinical words he had used- never mind what they were _saying_.

            One of the graspers pointed towards some cushions that had been laid out. “Please step away from my desk and rest temporarily. I am communicating this information to the appropriate offices and it is somewhat tedious to respond to multiple sets of sensory input at the same time. Someone will be with you shortly, I assure it.”

            Did she sound concerned? Keith wasn’t sure. Those choppy-sounding words definitely came at a brisker staccato than they had before. He took a cushion, folding his feet under him as he looked to Vrek. “Where the hell did you get all that? That… class three, stuff.”

            “I didn’t forget everything when I dropped out of my apprenticeship.”

            “Apprenticeship?”

            “I’m from Karvengard, Kethe. My clan only goes back four or five generations. _Everybody_ that side of the ice ships their kids off to apprentice with witches, especially if they’re looking for a quick way to prestige. ‘Course, then my master told me that teaching me any further would be a waste, and the clan more or less agreed with him, so, I’m officially on exile until I can ‘make something of myself’.”

            He said it so lightly, too.

            Keith wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Did that mean Vrek was living _alone_? Did Auntie know about this? For a family to neglect their offspring that blatantly, it was the burden of anyone decent to step in.

            People weren’t meant to be alone. He knew that more than anyone.

            Vrek smiled thinly at him. They’d both shed protective layers at the station, so they could see each others’ faces clearly. Vrek’s pelt was a medium brown banded with darker stripes- at the corners of his face, they broke into speckles around his golden eyes. He was still young, so he hadn’t much of a mane yet- just a neat stripe down the back of his head that he usually kept tied back. Keith himself, five years his junior, only had most of a full head by a fortuitous stroke of his terran father’s genetics.

            Keith liked Vrek. He still wasn’t sure what to make of some members of the squad, but he’d been paired off with Vrek the most, and the other Crow tended to keep a good humor, even with how much he hated the cold. It was hard to imagine someone so bright and friendly being so despised as to have been cast out by his own clan. Could Vrek have really come from such hateful people?

            It was a bad thought to sit in, especially when so much else was already going wrong. He looked over to the receptionist, who had gone back to stacking cards, pausing now and then for further presumably meaning-laden convulsions of her optic.

            While she couldn’t help it, he kind of wished she’d been something with a face. Koorians were extremely hard to read, and not knowing wasn’t helping his nerves.

            “What’s a… class two, and class three, like you were saying?”

            “Classifications of aberrant phenomenon. Sounds scary, but basically it’s jargon for ‘stuff we don’t know what’s causing it.’ Class one is fixed properties, proven harmless. Like you know that famous cave of lights? Glows, messes with equipment, we’ve got no idea what’s up with it? That’s a class one. Not gonna hurt anybody unless you’ve got a pacemaker, predictable, safe, been the same way since they found it fifty years ago. Class _two_ is when it’s able to affect someone physically, mentally, or behaviorally. This thing pulled you down there and Goraz nearly walked off the cliff if Commander hadn’t pulled him back- that’s two times. It’s trying to pull people down into the cave, so from cursory analysis, it’s the same thing acting the same way. It only stays class two, though, if it doesn’t _change_ behavior. If it modifies its patterns- in range or intensity, which, it seems to be doing both- then it’s class three.”

            “ _Goraz_ was affected?” It… made sense, with how haunted he’d looked, but… “Shouldn’t he have come with us?”

            “Should’ve? Kethe, damn the equipment, they all should’ve pulled out when we did. Why do you think they sent us? Remember what I said about old-blood clans? What do you think the Crows _are_? Order was formed right at the end of the Lost Era- as far back as things _go_. This thing’s advancing outwards, and doing it fast. The drone reported class one phenomena inside the ruin. Our first day down it spread to the camp. They wanted us to get the word out, and get out of there, in case they can’t hold the line.”

            Keith shot to his feet. Blood was rushing in his ears. “ _What_? And you just-” it was a helpless thread of anger to chase.

            Vrek stared him down evenly. Having already reached the conclusion. Because it was an order, because it didn’t matter if Auntie was Auntie, she was also Commander Dorma- because something trying not to be an order was still an order.

            Keith realized the receptionist was watching them both. He sat down quickly, like his feet went numb. “…I can’t believe it.”

            “You didn’t think it was weird we didn’t try to call? Radiation storms aren’t _that_ bad this time of year.”

            There was nothing more to say, so nothing was said. Keith closed one hand over the other and pressed his knuckles against his brow, breathing warmth into his folded hands. Praying.

            _Mother, watch over her; she’s your sister, and she’s been a good aunt, a good commander. I’ll pay in incense, as soon as we’re both home, I promise, for you, and grandma, and my father, too-_

            He paused. Did terran spirits need incense? Did they linger at all? His father had come from three terran cultures, but that side of the family had long been estranged. Theirs was a strange arrangement, terrans- people who shared blood did not often live together except as a concession to their children while the latter were young. Now and then, he’d received transmissions- letters or pictures- from his father’s fair, thin-haired kin; people who smiled at cameras and stood together, intertwined in arms or standing before floral bowers. Sometimes, he sent things back. It couldn’t really be called a relationship.

            Still, though, Auntie was going to need as much help as she could possibly get. He should at least try. Terrans had souls just as much as any galra, after all- surely, they needed something to keep them warm in the afterlife when they’d no more skin.

            _Father, I’m sorry I don’t know the right ways to greet you. I’ll learn, I’ll study, I’ll- try to do better, than what I’ve been. I’m sure your relatives are wonderful people, too. They’re family, and I should have tried, and it’s terrible to wait until I really need a favor but forgive me, please, I’ll pay my debts, just this once, forgive me my trespasses_.

            Unbidden in his mind floated the image of the empty funeral lantern- soaked with melt, cased in ice.

            _There’s a demon in the dark. Unfed and starving, descendants dead or gone, I don’t know, but I know it’s hunting the living. I need your help. Spirits of House Azazi, your children are under attack, your good blood is spilled on the ice. Remind the demon what warmth feels like- take it into the circle or drive it to the edges of the world with fire._

He bowed once, broke his hands, and climbed cautiously to his feet. Like any civic building, they had a place here, for those caught praying away from their homes and proper altars, a small oil lantern and containers of disposable needles and slips of paper. He took a prayer slip and needle, pricked his thumb and pressed it to the strip until it made a wide, round mark. Then, since he was still feeling nervous, he blotted his thumb a second time on the top of the paper before he fed it to the flames, folded his hands and bowed one more time.

            A dab of sealing cream on the wound closed it, and he turned, to see Vrek talking to two people.

            One of them was a young woman, Verveni like Vrek- her half-grown mane cascaded in luxurious wine-colored waves over one shoulder before it fed back into her braid. It was in such stark contrast to her nearly white pelt that he wondered if she dyed it. Stacks of heavy bangles hung from all four limbs, and an enormous black-feathered vulture hawk was perched on a thick leather platform on her shoulder, watching him with bright red eyes. Her clothes flaunted the clan mark on her collarbone- a rising bird crowned by three eyes and a ring of light.

            The crest of House Kavazai- the ruling clan of the Fourth Kingdom.

            Keith’s mouth dried up very suddenly as she glanced at him, taking him in with eyes just as vivid scarlet as her bird’s.

            She seemed entertained, and turned her head slightly, saying something to her companion. He was a giant, even among full-blooded galra, and had clearly aged well despite the obvious whitening of his mane. An old-fashioned gentleman, he wore it trimmed close and bound back at the nape of the neck with a silken cord, letting the end of it trail neatly down his spine. There was a gallant, handsome quality to his proud features, marred only by a sharp, diagonal parting of his paling fur- a scar that struck cleanly through one of his eyes, rendering it unusable by the embroidered patch tied over it. He dressed modestly, only small touches of costly gold thread bringing light to his sable indoor coat.

            Even so, there was no mistaking the ruler of the Ninth Kingdom, even before one saw the beautifully wrought sword tucked into his belt- his badge of office. As that lone gold eye passed in Keith’s direction, he stiffened on reflex, pressing his fist to the bicep of the opposite arm. “Lord Kolivan, sir.”

            “At ease.” His Lordship spoke in a rumble as cultured as his appearance. “I understand you were the first affected.”

            “He was.” Vrek interceded, since Keith was preoccupied preventing his nerves from turning themselves into gelatin and thus didn’t trust himself to speak. “Didn’t wake up until Ilun and Mav found him in the cave.”

            Lord Kolivan’s companion stepped forward, a manicured talon positioning itself at his eye level. She hummed and tilted her head. The intensity of her scrutiny was such that Keith didn’t feel at luxury to move.

            After a pause, Lord Kolivan spoke again. “What do you make of it?”

            “Certainly _something_.” In contrast to His Lordship, she had a high, sharp voice, almost like a bird’s. It carried a certain snappy quality. She pinched Keith’s chin between her fingers, turned his head side to side. “If he’d come straight here I might be able to get a better read on it, but, as it is… Don’t squirm,” she admonished him, but seemed to relent and let go of his face a moment later. “No, I won’t be able to tell that much until I trace it to the source. Good news for _you_ at least,” she said it almost as if it was his fault. “That means you’re not likely to have any further symptoms barring re-exposure. Not enough in your body to affect you.”

            After a pause, “I would prefer if you did not pronounce the survival of my subordinates like it’s unfortunate.”

            The woman tossed her arms outwards in what at first seemed to be a rather dramatic shrug- on closer inspection, she had avoided moving her shoulders so as not to startle her bird. “I’m only _saying_. It makes getting to the root of it inconvenient.”

            Vrek’s mouth shifted in a faint line. “Perhaps, Your Majesty, I don’t mean to presume, but there may be opportunities to study the situation further when we retrieve the four other members of the expedition?”

            Keith gaped at Vrek. Lord Kolivan seemed to merely look to him. The woman thus addressed paused for a moment, and then barked a laugh. “Good! Wonderful. I was looking for an excuse to avoid that meeting.”

            “General Krai will be disappointed to hear that.”

            The woman was already walking off, and flapped a careless gesture over her shoulder, as if she wasn’t speaking to one of the most influential people in all the Nine Kingdoms, about another: “She disapproves of me anyway, I’m not going to waste breath courting her nonexistent favor when something _interesting_ is happening.”

            His Lordship stared after her for a moment, then sighed, shook his head with something that nearly felt like grandfatherly fondness. To Keith and Vrek, “You’ll excuse the Queen, I hope. She’s of a certain wild spirit.”

            “Oh, we’re all quite familiar.” Vrek said wryly.

            Keith was still staring after her. “ _That’s_ the Fourth Queen?” He’d heard she was young, but he’d no idea she was _that_ young. She seemed _his_ age.

            He remembered, belatedly, who he was talking to, and fidgeted again. “Meaning no disrespect, Your Lordship.”

            The Ninth Lord seemed untroubled. “None taken. But, if you will permit me to divert to pressing matters… Young Vrek has explained much of the situation to me. I would prefer to hear what you experienced, in as much detail as you can recall.”

            It was the third time he had recounted it in two days, but, he took a deep breath, and attempted to organize himself once again. “This was… my first assignment, sir. I’ve done hard work before, but, working with Auntie…”

            “‘Auntie’?”

            “That’d be Commander Dorma, sir.” Vrek filled in. “He’s her sister’s younger child.”

            A solemn nod. “Continue.”

            Keith swallowed a bit. “I couldn’t slow everyone down. So I was-” it sounded pathetic to say it out loud. “-nervous on the way out. After dinner on the first day, I wasn’t feeling well. Thought it was the nerves, and that I just needed to sleep it off.”

            He’d been able to piece together something besides just waking up in the cave- a kind of floating, half-remembered dream. “Someone was singing. There were war drums. I felt like I had to go, like he was ordering me.”

            “He?”

            He shook his head. “No idea, sir. But I remember thinking that. The drums were calling me down. It meant he’d made his decision, whatever… that was.”

            Lord Kolivan’s expression was very stern.

            Keith ducked his head after a moment. “I’m sorry, sir. I know that it isn’t much.”

            A black-gloved hand rested on his shoulder. “No. This is important. Thank you for telling me. Do you feel confident returning to the site?”

            “I have to, sir. My aunt is still out there.”

            “Then meet us at the station. We’ll be with you.”

~

            And he hadn’t lied.

            There were two more sleds waiting beside the one they’d taken- larger, sleeker things, one emblazoned with the ninth kingdom’s wolf, another with the same rising, three-eyed bird. The Queen was already leaning on the rail of that one, gloved and cloaked, but she’d left much of her face exposed. Her hawk had its head lofted into the wind, perched out on one of her arms. She must have been stronger than she looked- it was a positively enormous bird, and yet, she held it up without any sort of difficulty.

            Besides her, both of the sleds were loaded with personnel- Keith recognized another full unit of Crows split between the sleds and then two others, masked and wearing heavy gauntlets that stood in Kolivan’s shadow. Those must be Ravens, he realized- elite of the elite, their armor much like the recognizable Crow armor but pure black. Only a few key silver accents marked one of them as a veteran in the field.

            One of the Ravens stepped over to them as they approached, holding their hand out toward Vrek for the keys. “I’m driving.”

            Vrek, continuing to shock Keith, cracked a smile. “It’s my faction’s sled.”

            A quiet huff from the Raven. “You’re the joker, huh?” They tilted their head towards Keith. “Then you’re the rookie?”

            Keith, shocking himself, “so everybody tells me.”

            This time the huff was nearly an actual laugh. “Seriously, though. I’m driving. We’re going in pretty close formation and we’re gonna be hauling it.”

            “Fair enough.” Vrek surrendered the keys, and the three of them mounted the sled.

            As promised, no sooner had everyone belted down and the sled rumbled to life than the Raven gunned the throttle, and they took off with a sharp lurch. The Raven didn’t even flinch.

            A flicker of a shadow- the Queen released her bird, letting it take skyward. It extended its wings and soared in the wake of the sleds, falling behind them, but matching pace surprisingly well.

            The trip was short, at that speed. They came to a halt well outside the camp, the vulture hawk flying past to circle over the tents before it came back to rest on the Queen’s arm.

            She lifted her head. “I thought you said the rest of your unit was here.”

            Keith’s stomach dropped.

            “Are you saying they aren’t?” Vrek sounded almost incredulous.

            “Sekha said there’s no one here.” The Queen let her bird hop from her hand onto her shoulder. “You’re free to prove her wrong, if you’d like.”

            Keith set off towards the tents at a run.

            The fire was still half-burning, running low on its supply of fuel. It hadn’t been banked or extinguished- just left burning. There was no one in two of the tents.

            In the sleeper, someone had left out a coil of nylon rope. Ilun’s knife was stuck point-down through the fabric, one end of the rope tied around it. The other end had been looped several times around itself, lying with an empty slack about the size of someone’s waist.

            Keith picked up the knife. The cord had been knotted very tightly, but clumsily. It took him a few tries to undo it, picking carefully with his nails, before the knife came free.

            “Shit,” breathed a voice. Keith jumped- it was the other Raven. She sounded older than her partner. “They tied themselves down and it still took them. Like a ghost story.”

            He moved outside, barely noticing when the Raven moved out of his way. The tents were thick with people now, more like an investigation site than anything. Vrek’s voice, across the area, raised in anger- “-nightfall, both times, we were gone less than an hour-”

            Past the windbreak, the voices were quieter, at least. His foot struck something half-covered in drifts- he crouched, brushed the snow from it, and picked it up.

            An emergency flare. The cap had been knocked off, but it’d never been launched.

            _Promise me_.

            _On the ancestors’ graves_.

            It was hard to manage the rappel with one hand full of knife and flare. He ended up sticking Ilun’s knife into his boot. Someone shouted, faintly, but he wasn’t listening to them.

            The cave loomed like a black mouth. He didn’t stop to let his eyes adjust- he dragged the head of the flare along the exposed edge of the lantern, let the fire cast over everything in its path.

            Dripping water, same as before, a path that plunged into the belly of the glacier.

            He followed it, keeping his grip on the flare with one hand, and the knife with the other.

            It really was, just as promised, a grand old estate. Huge walls framed the entire compound, towers stretching to disappear in the roof of the cave. The gates were closed, but the water came from a gap in the wall near the base. He waded until he was up to his chest, took a breath and dove. The flare’s glow was consumed by darkness, but he could see, even from here, a faint disturbance in the darkness of the cavern. Kicking forward, he swam until he was just under that pool of faint light, and pushed upwards.

            He surfaced through a thin skin of ice, his scarf soaked through and pressing to his face, but it was faintly warm here. The brittle shells of long-dead plants crackled under his feet as he climbed out of the pond.

            He struck the flare on the wall, relit it, and looked around. This was a courtyard- the remnants of a garden. He’d come in through its pond.

            There was also a dead body strewn amongst the weeds.

            Heart hammering in his chest, he moved closer, forced himself to crouch and turn them over. He didn’t rest until he saw the face, and found it unfamiliar.

            She looked like she’d died old. Swaddled in the many layers of a widow, not much of her features were left after all this time, but compassion overcame nausea. He touched her eyelids with his thumb, murmured small words, and continued.

            From the garden, there was a door into the kitchen. It creaked and groaned heavily as he pushed it open, and stuck halfway so he had to squeeze carefully around it. The flare’s light reflected dully off of ancient cookware, many of it showing aging patinas. A reeking door seemed to lead to the larder- besides its stomach-turning contents, it was empty.

            The dining hall was arrayed in a peculiar fashion- upright chairs and a high table instead of cushions. These were occupied- more bodies. Old, decaying ones, all sitting up. Had they died that way, or been propped in their places after death? Looking among them, he could even see they had been set methodically- the ones arranged by the head of the table were older, clothed in rotting finery. Younger and humbler-dressed ones were closer to the door he’d come through.

            The tallest chair, at the far end of the room, sat empty. Were it not for the stillness of it, and the limp quality of the bodies, one could nearly imagine they were waiting for someone important to begin a feast.

            _Now_ Keith thought he might be sick. He retreated back into the kitchen, closed the door, and caught his breath until the taste of bile faded. Here, in this castle, was the last place he wanted to be reminded of home, of the celebration when he’d gotten accepted into the academy- being set near the head of the table, by the clan’s patriarch, the old man wheezing with laughter at a joke, and looking down the full length of the table at his relatives- Auntie, catching his eye multiple times throughout the meal and smiling each one. His sister, more subdued, but nodding to him, saying little.

            Home, that place had been bright and alive, rich with fire and smoke and clattering dishes, Uncle Ravik bragging about his secret recipe, cousin Jeia nudging more onto Keith’s plate, telling him that he needed to eat more to get some growing in before basic training.

            This place was an uncomfortable, stifling warmth, a slow thaw that wafted nothing but decay. The great hearths were empty.

            The only other door in the kitchen led to a hall of some kind. A huge staircase was nestled against the wall, over the door. He could feel the vastness of the space like a faint wind, but the flare cast little light.

            The ground shook- not enough to throw him off his feet, but, he stumbled, braced himself against the wall. The knife scraped in his grip.

            Slowly, the castle settled back to silence. No, Keith realized- not true silence. There was a hum now, quiet but steady. The creak and groan of machinery somewhere beneath it.

            “Well, well. It seems another wretch has stumbled their way into my home.”

            Keith jumped. “Who’s there? Who are you?!”

            The hall’s lights came on, slowly, starting at one end and making their way forwards. “Stand up properly, boy. Don’t yelp like that. Where are your manners? One hopes you’re not an indicator of modern youth.”

            Keith wrinkled his nose, stepping forwards. “Look, four people went missing down here. Sorry if I’m _intruding_ , but this is an investigation.”

            Faintly, an engine shifted into higher gear. “ _Have_ they, now.” The voice sounded interested.

            With a sudden bang, a pair of enormous doors at the end of the hallway sprang open.

            “Well?” the voice asked sharply. “What are you waiting for? Come here, where I can see you properly. This is no way to make a request of the lord of a house, now, is it?”

            Keith’s hackles stood up. He stared at the door, then, tightened his grip on the knife and the flare. Whoever- _whatever_ this was, demon or dead ancestor or… he didn’t even know- he had to find them. Goraz. Mav. Ilun.

            Auntie.

            He stepped forwards.

            Beyond the first set of doors there was a massive amphitheater. He stood aligned with the highest seats, where they plunged ahead of him in a veritable sea to a distant field below. It lay dark and empty.

            A door to his left creaked open. “Come along now,” the voice sounded nearly bored, “that’s enough gawking. Really, you’ve very little idea of how to conduct yourself. You’re quite rude, creeping in here uninvited and now ogling everything in your path. You’re wasting my time.”

            He might’ve said something irritably, that this person’s clan was long dead, however storied it might’ve been, and that was no excuse to treat people this way, but he tamped that down, however narrowly.

            The disembodied movement of doors, and lights as they illuminated, led him through a truly cavernous place. He had thought the castle large from the outside- it was enormous. He could only assume that it extended heavily into the rock below the glacier.

            He stepped into another hallway- and stopped dead. Half of the wall had caved in, crumbled columns lying across each other and rubble strewn across the floor. Bodies, as well- soldiers in old-fashioned armor. A gouge had been torn in part of the ceiling- nothing but brooding darkness seemed visible beyond.

            “Oh, do excuse the mess,” the voice said. “I suppose that’s what _happens_ when one has all the time they could possibly want. I haven’t gotten around to tidying up just yet. But I can’t have you thinking of me as an ungracious host, now, can I? Stay right where you are, boy, I’ll tend to the matter.”

            Its last words were nearly drowned out as the creaking of gears found sudden crescendo, climbed to a _roar_. The castle shook around them, scattering pieces of rubble.

            Slender metal arms emerged from the stricken parts of the wall, each one several times Keith’s entire body length and jointed in multiple places. They seized the fallen structures and dragged them across the floor, hefting the broken pillars. The bodies were left where they lay; stone sprayed on one, clipping its jaw and forcing its head to the side.

            Keith had to take a moment to find his nerve again.

            In that time, one of the pillars was twisted, its angle adjusted. It didn’t quite fit into its place in the wall, but was drawn close enough. “Hmph. I’ll have to tamper with it later.” Then, with faint suppressed amusement, “You may move now.”

            It was more order than reassurance. He was beginning to hate this voice, its lazy certainty, the way that it felt so at ease making such grand movements as if it were nothing.

            Maybe it really was nothing, to this strange lord.

            He had made it just underneath the sundered ceiling when he happened to look up- and exclaimed.

            “What? What are you babbling about?” The voice seemed almost concerned now.

            “What… _is_ that?”

            There were eyes in the dark- huge eyes that gleamed lamplike and unblinking down at him.

            “What is-” Much faster, one of the arms flitted back out again, prodding blindly at the gap. The eyes disappeared as soon as it did- the arm scoured the gap, and came up with nothing, retracting down from the ceiling to hover as if glaring at him, even though it had no eyes. “…Hmph. Make yourself useful, boy- what did you see?”

            _I asked you because I didn’t know what it was_ \- but that wasn’t a useful report. He sucked in a breath, and hesitated.

            Maybe it was just his petulant, contrary thoughts looking for purchase. Maybe it was the way his knuckles had gone a little bit numb, with how tightly he’d been holding the flare. But something _occurred_ to him.

            “You said ‘another’ wandered into your house. But when I told you people were missing, you responded like you had no idea. Who came here before I did?”

            A warning growl. The arm positioned over him flexed. “I told you, boy. Don’t make requests skulking around. Come where I can see you properly. That’s an order.”

            His hackles stood. “ _Answer my question._ ”

            The arm plunged towards him. Keith flipped his grip on Ilun’s knife, and swept it in an arc. The last digit separated at the joint, but more of them were flooding the gaps, reaching for him. Cables and wires lashed like tentacles.

            He ran. When the door ahead of him erupted in lashing metal arms, he ducked into a side door, shoving it aside. The castle around him shook.

            This was some kind of sitting room. Low ceiling, ruined armchairs- a large empty hearth to one side. The carpet squirmed, pieces of the floor picking itself away to make room for machines to attack him.

            He had to keep moving.

            The next room wasn’t so fortunate- this was another blasted, gouged hallway, so large someone could have landed a frigate in its belly if the roof were lifted off, and already writhing with shifting metal.

            Three, four arms closed on him- he struck at them with the knife, cut one, another- his hand jerked sharply. A cable had closed around his wrist, constricting. Ilun’s knife flickered, fell.

            “No-!”

            He twisted to try and grab it, but that loosened his grip on the flare. He realized- too late- grabbed for it- his hand closed on the flame, and the world went dark.

            For a moment, he was surrounded by the darkness and the moving machines, tightening their grip, his heart in his ears, frozen.

            Gone.

            They were gone.

            What was he doing? He couldn’t- maybe, if he let himself go, now, he’d be taken to the same place they were.

            His stinging hand closed over the burn left by the flare- and, then, suddenly, it was as if he could hear Auntie, speaking in his ear.

            _Never let the enemy control where you’re moving, Kethe, you idiot! That’s how people like us_ die _!_

            That hand was still free. Cords were wrapping around his chest, heavier graspers securing their grip on his shoulder, but-

            His weapon holster was still on his hip.

            The stinger knuckle crackled with light- he swung it blind and connected with one of the mechanical arms, unloading a full charge into it.

            It recoiled, and the other arms _paused_ \- that was the space he needed, turning the knuckle’s claws and sawing the cables off of him.

            They were already recovering. He didn’t have time. His eyes had adjusted to the gloom, enough that he could make out the moving shapes. He slid his other hand into the matching knuckle, and swung with that one, a lighter impact, only half a charge, into one of the arms in his way.

            That meant he had eight full shots. Eighteen, if he went light. The important thing was to get the high ground- these things came from the walls and from the floor, but he hadn’t seen them come down from above yet. This hall had a staircase off one side- he hit it at a run, skipping over a grasping talon that pushed from a hole in the ground.

            “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, _brat_ , but you’ll accomplish nothing.” The voice was strained, angry now, not playing at indulgence. “I don’t think _you_ know. You think you’ve stopped me? Inconvenienced, even?”

            It only went up one floor. There were holes, here, places he had to watch his footing. A collapsed chandelier filled the hallway ahead of him, but there was a gap over it, a narrow alcove where someone smaller than usual could fit through. Mechanical arms were trying to reach through the floor, emerging from the walls, already pushing towards him.

            He threw himself forwards, through the opening, tumbled and caught himself. The hall forked in three directions.

            “You aren’t going the right way,” the voice called to him, mocking. “I thought you ought to know that.”

            New arms- these tipped with blades- were emerging from the left-hand route. He swung around and moved to the right. There were arms there, too- he set both knuckles and aimed for the wires, spent three charges getting through, two from his left hand, one from his right. Only two charges in his left- if he spent them both, he’d be vulnerable on that side.

            _Always_ _keep track of your ammo, Rookie. You won’t like what happens if you run out in the middle of something._

Goraz.

            Another staircase- this took him up two, maybe even three floors. This had to be the tower at the center of the compound. Something shifted in front of him- fire doors. They slid down from above.

            Not quick enough. He passed the first with ease, ducked and slid under the second before he caught himself and was back on his feet, still going as it sealed behind him.

            “So, you insist, do you?”

            Keith hesitated. The voice’s tone was different, suddenly; the hall he stood in was bereft of mechanical arms, but the mechanisms in the belly of the structure were louder than they had been before- or was he closer to them?

            Light flooded, suddenly, blinding him, the fixtures all bursting to life with a _snap_. The door ahead of him opened.

            It was a throne room. The carpet eaten by time, the raised dais, the tattered banners hanging from the walls behind the chair itself.

            The body on the throne was ancient- barely more than a skeleton with skin, wrapped in robes and dense, elaborate armor. It was draped across the chair limply, the weighing figure of a twisted, seven-horned skull, heavy on its brow.

            From the corpse’s back, like a pair of wings, twisted enormous metal structures that sank into the wall. These creaked, groaned, shifted with the weight of ages as the body pulled itself to sit upright. The eyes that opened to regard him were sunken, and uniformly black as pitch.

            “You’re-”

            The bottom dropped out of Keith’s stomach.

            “I suppose, then,” when speaking in person, even his voice was a ragged thing, dry and wheezing, “I can humor you this much.” As if with herculean effort, he pressed his hands to the armrests of the throne, and began to rise, slowly.

            Keith- needed to move. He had to run. But he stood, rooted to the spot, frozen, before the heart that lay before him.

            It really was a demon. Descendants lost, bloodline not forgotten but _buried_. They had been so wrong- how could they have known? How could an earthquake have brought _this_ place of all things to them?

            The lantern had been a warning. Not memorial, not honor- in its day, it would have been filled with water, a denial of it ever seeing light.

            An invocation to forget, to turn away, to leave it where it lay.

            And they, carelessly-

            The demon stopped in front of him, staring down with cold eyes. His knees had given out- he wasn’t sure when he’d hit the floor. Something was roaring in his ears.

            “So,” the demon said, softly, faintly pleased. “You understand, now, do you? You know your place. You’re ready to join them.”

            A rotting hand reached towards him.

            All at once, Keith’s eyes focused on that- the claw, and its graying, bald flesh, studded with tarnished rings.

            The roaring wasn’t in his ears, it was outside, something else, a sound, over the machinery- the demon hesitated, lifted his head to look around with a snarl.

            “So many pointless intrusions-”

            The knuckle slammed into a stomach that was mostly cloth and air.

            It was like hitting an unyielding wall. The first charge dissipated and he unloaded a second, hauling himself to his feet. The only thing he could think of was that he _had to get out of here_.

            One of the metal arms caught him from behind- threw him tumbling forwards. He slid to the edge of a hole in the floor, one arm dangling in the emptiness.

            “It seems I am fated to be surrounded by impudent children.” The demon seemed unaffected. “What a pity my descendants have fallen this far.”

            A shadow- another moving arm. Keith rolled, brought his left gauntlet up towards it-

            It clicked ineffectively- the knuckle was dark, its charges spent. A moment later, the arm struck him in the chest.

            He fell in the darkness.

            His back struck a wall, tumbling to a stop on what felt like rubble. This room was dark again, the only light pouring from the holes in the floor above.

            But there was no wall between him and the arms- here, they bristled like a forest. Keith winced, waiting for impact-

            But most of the arms seemed occupied. They were staying away from him, clinging to something else- some shape in the center of the room. It was the arms in the room above that instead reached down towards him, giving him the time to stun them with his right hand, and make a beeline towards the center.

            He didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t know if he had any chance at all, but whatever he could- he had to do something.

            The target of all of the arms was thrashing, surprisingly quickly given how large it was. It seemed connected to something bigger, the floors beneath the throne room had collapsed.

            “Of all of the insolent-” the demon’s voice snarled. “Know your master! _Behave_!”

            Jaws parted and snapped against the current of restraint, snapping the arms that had probed further inside of it. It opened again, and _howled_ \- that same sound as before.

            So there was something here he couldn’t control.

            Keith checked his right gauntlet. Two and a half shots left. No time to reload.

            Better make them count.

            The smaller arms joined into larger ones as they were closer to their sources. He made a run for one of those larger arms, leaped onto its back- didn’t discharge but reached with the claws of the knuckle and tore at the wires. The large arm recoiled, but all of its smaller attachments went limp, twitching as it threw him off.

            The thrashing thing was a head- a head of some kind of giant metal animal. The plates rippled and folded over themselves as it snarled and snapped, as fluidly as if it were flesh. Golden eyes blazed in their fixtures, a single, massive forelimb sinking claws into the buckling floor as if to try and haul itself upright. Something was pulling it down from below.

            He hauled himself into the gap, plunging downward.

            More arms, here. The demon could afford to be cautious, or he could afford to hang onto the beast- he couldn’t do both at the same time. Smaller arms came at him, but he repelled them with half-shots, and continued to rip at wires, punch through protective coating.

            In increments, the arms lost their grip. The beast freed one of its hind legs and tore an entire swathe of them out, bellowing triumph.

            “ _Enough_!” The arms turned on him en masse, bringing sharpened weapons to bear. “You will not cost me my weapon!”

            He swung, ready to spend his last shot. When not distracted, however, the arms were far too agile- one caught his arm and _yanked_ , hard, throwing him another time. Pain fireworked in his shoulder, echoing louder as he landed on it, tumbled to a stop. It dangled limp when he tried to stand up, throbbing.

            A forest of metal blades closed on him.

            Through them, he saw a glimpse of gold eyes.

            **_TRUST._**

            It was not a voice, but something that thundered, echoed in his mind.

            **_TRUST, BE STILL._**

**_ALL DEBTS REPAID._ **

Keith closed his eyes. Warmth, and something that shimmered even against the darkness of his lids, an indescribable vivid hue, consistent and shifting all at once.

            The world

            Faded.


End file.
